Kevin Bacon Trivia
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59 free Kevin Bacon trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Kevin Bacon trivia quiz runs through five decades of the actor's career, from a one-line debut in Animal House and an arrow through the throat in Friday the 13th to Footloose, Diner, JFK, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, The Woodsman, X-Men: First Class, The Following and City on a Hill. It also covers the parts of his life that make good pub questions: the Bacon Brothers band, his marriage to Kyra Sedgwick, the money lost to Bernie Madoff, the egg and phone-network commercials, and the fact that he and his wife turned out to be distant cousins. Naturally there is a whole stretch on Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: who invented it, which two films they were watching, what his own Bacon number is, and how it fused with the mathematicians' Erdős number. Difficulty ranges from questions any Footloose fan will get to details only a completist knows. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Bacon, his films and the people around him, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Kevin Bacon born and raised?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is where he learned the trade as a teenager, studying and performing at the Manning Street Actor's Theatre before he finished high school and left to chase a stage career.
Q 02At 17, Bacon left home to study acting in which city?
New York
New York drew him to the Circle in the Square theater school. His first film did not bring the breakthrough he hoped for, so he went back to the stage.
Q 03Kevin Bacon's father, Edmund Bacon, reshaped his home city's downtown in which job?
Urban planner
Urban planner Edmund Bacon ran his city's planning commission for two decades, and at 92 he rode a skateboard across a park he had conceived to defy a ban on skating there.
Q 04Bacon made his feature film debut in which 1978 comedy?
Animal House
Animal House took him because its director wanted unknowns rather than famous comedians. It made him no star, though, and he went back to waiting tables.
Q 05In which 1980 slasher film did Bacon play a camp counselor?
Friday the 13th
Friday the 13th gave him what he calls a classic slasher death: his counselor Jack smokes a joint and sleeps with his girlfriend, which in that genre means you are next.
Q 06How is Bacon's camp counselor Jack killed from beneath his bunk in the 1980 slasher?
An arrow through the throat
An arrow through the throat, shot with Bacon kneeling under the bed, his head poking through a hole above the only fake neck they had. The blood pump broke, so the effects man blew through the tube himself.
Q 07Which pair, one a future Top Gun star, shared Bacon's Broadway debut, Slab Boys?
Sean Penn and Val Kilmer
Sean Penn and Val Kilmer joined him in 1983 in a play set among Scottish apprentices grinding colours in a carpet factory, a job the playwright John Byrne had once done himself.
Q 08Which theater award did Bacon win in 1982 for the off-Broadway play Forty Deuce?
Obie Award
An Obie Award, the off-Broadway honor, went to Bacon for playing a young street hustler in Forty Deuce, and he repeated the part that year in a low-budget film of the play.
Q 09Bacon played Fenwick in which 1982 Barry Levinson film about friends in 1959 Baltimore?
Diner
Diner cast him as Fenwick, the friend who fakes a car crash for a laugh, and the cult hit launched not just Bacon but Steve Guttenberg and Ellen Barkin too.
Q 10What is the name of Bacon's character in Footloose?
Ren McCormack
Ren McCormack, the Chicago kid who takes on a town's dancing ban, made Bacon a pop idol, which he has said was the last thing he wanted as a serious stage actor.
Q 11How did Bacon prepare for his Footloose role?
Went undercover at a high school
He went undercover at a high school in Provo for a day as the new kid and was picked on for his tie and hair, which he says shaped how he played the part.
Q 12The town behind Footloose lifted its dancing ban in 1980 so students could hold what?
Junior prom
A junior prom was the prize: Elmore City had banned dancing since 1898, and the school board split 2-2 until its president broke the tie with the words "Let 'em dance."
Q 13Which two actors were slated for the Footloose lead before Bacon?
Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe
Q 21Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination as the villain of The River Wild (1994) opposite which actress?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep plays the rafting guide whose family trip his armed robber hijacks. He called the shoot grueling, since everyone fell out of the boat at some point and had to be saved.
Q 22Bacon played which real astronaut in Apollo 13 (1995), a backup who joined the crew days before launch?
Jack Swigert
Jack Swigert stepped in when Ken Mattingly was grounded over a measles scare. It is his character who stirs the oxygen tanks moments before one of them explodes.
Q 23Who directed Bacon and Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 (1995)?
Ron Howard
Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe both fell through: the producers loved Cruise's Risky Business underwear dance but he was filming All the Right Moves, and Lowe tore a knee ligament while auditioning.
Q 14Bacon was furious that which Footloose scene needed four doubles?
Warehouse dance
The warehouse dance used a stunt double, a dance double and two gymnasts as well as him. When the studio told him never to mention them, he refused.
Q 15Who played the dance-banning Reverend Shaw Moore in Footloose?
John Lithgow
John Lithgow plays him as a grieving father rather than a villain: the ban followed his son's death in a car crash after a night of drinking and dancing.
Q 16Which Deniece Williams song from Footloose was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar?
Let's Hear It for the Boy
Let's Hear It for the Boy was a replacement: the director felt the song first set to the scene where Bacon's character teaches a friend to dance was not working, so its writers came up with a new one.
Q 17Bacon had a cameo in which 1987 John Hughes comedy?
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Planes, Trains and Automobiles has him beat Steve Martin to a Manhattan taxi. Early the next year he had the lead in Hughes's She's Having a Baby.
Q 18In which 1990 movie did Bacon's character save a desert town from underground 'graboid' monsters?
Tremors
Tremors came in a career slump, and he groaned that he couldn't believe he was doing a movie about underground worms. Decades later he shot a TV revival that no network picked up.
Q 19In Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (1990), Bacon plays a medical student who does what?
Experiments with near-death
He experiments with near-death alongside Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland: they stop their own hearts to glimpse the afterlife, and each comes back haunted by a past wrong.
Q 20In A Few Good Men (1992), Bacon played what role in the courtroom?
The prosecuting attorney
The prosecuting attorney he plays, Marine captain Jack Ross, offers a plea deal before trial. The accused refuse it as dishonorable, which is what sends the case into open court.
Ron Howard shot the weightless scenes for real, taking cast and crew up in a NASA training plane for hundreds of dives that each gave well under a minute of float.
Q 24Bacon directed the 1996 TV film Losing Chase, which won which actress a Golden Globe?
Helen Mirren
Helen Mirren won as a woman home from a breakdown who slowly warms to the helper her husband hires. Bacon cast his own wife as the helper.
Q 25On the 1998 thriller Wild Things, Bacon took a supporting role and also served as what?
Executive producer
As executive producer he backed a script he called the trashiest thing he had ever read, won over because every few pages sprang another surprise.
Q 26In Hollow Man (2000), Bacon's scientist tests a serum on himself that leaves him what?
Invisible
Invisible and unable to change back, he turns on his own team. Paul Verhoeven directed, and the effects that strip him away layer by layer earned an Oscar nomination.
Q 27Who directed Mystic River (2003), in which Bacon starred with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins?
Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood is known for shooting fast, and Bacon said he did two or three takes at most and sometimes walked away after filming only the rehearsal.
Q 28In Murder in the First (1995), Bacon plays Henri Young, broken by years of solitary in which island prison?
Alcatraz
Alcatraz was both setting and location. Bacon slept in a solitary cell to prepare and shed weight he said he did not have to lose, and he calls it his toughest role.
Q 29In the 2004 drama The Woodsman, Bacon played what kind of character?
A sex offender on parole
He plays a sex offender on parole, home after 12 years in prison and living across from a school. Bacon admitted it was a tough sell, but it brought him an Independent Spirit nomination.
Q 30Bacon won a Golden Globe for playing Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl in which 2009 HBO film?
Taking Chance
Taking Chance is named for the fallen Marine, 19-year-old Chance Phelps. Strobl volunteered to escort his body home to Wyoming, and his journal of that trip became the film.