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David YurmanTHE AFTERNOON that Kevin
Bacon has planned for the two
of us sounds like something
out of a Nora Ephron film. We
meet in the marbled lobby of
his apartment building on
Central Park West, where a
friendly doorman tips his cap
as we leave, take a long amble
through Central Park, down a
path where Bacon knows the
cherry blossoms are in bloom,
and end up drinking dirty
martinis at the Leopard—the
white-tablecloth revamp of Café
des Artistes, which served the
likes of Marcel Duchamp and
Rudolph Valentino. It’s all so
classic, so swoony, rat-a-tat olde
New York, that I start to wonder
if Bacon and Ephron ever
worked together. They never
did, but according to The Oracle
of Bacon, a clunky GeoCities-
esque website that has, since
1996, been calculating the
actor’s arterial connections with
other actors in Hollywood, they
are only three degrees apart
(one chain has Carrie Fisher
and Meg Ryan in between).
When we walk into the
Leopard, the maître d’ greets
him like an old friend. Bacon
asks for the table he likes,
way in the back, past the
elephantine Impressionist
murals, past the gleaming oak
bar. A server tries to o≠er him
a few other plum tables, but
he turns them all down, like a
salt-and-pepper Goldilocks.
At 61, Bacon radiates a
comforting confidence. He’s
at ease asking for what he
wants in the kind of uptight
spot that would make most
people uneasy.
The Leopard may be a
“jackets preferred”
establishment, but Bacon
arrived as if it were a dive bar,
in black jeans, black boots,
black leather jacket, and black
baseball cap. He’s sporting a
wild, wiry mustache, grown for
his new Showtime series,
City on a Hill, a Ben A±eck–
produced crime drama set in
early-1990s Boston. Bacon stars
as Jackie Rohr, a graying, dirty-
mouthed FBI agent who
could have come straight from
a Coen brothers film. City on a
Hill is a police show, albeit one
that’s concerned more with
corruption and ambition than
abject lawlessness. “Crime
is not a big part of this thing,”
Bacon says. “This script
reminded me of French
Connection, Serpico, Dog Day
Afternoon, The Deer Hunter.”98 GQ.COM AUGUST 2019
The points of comparison
may seem lofty, but they
signal the kind of complicated
characters he wants to be
playing. Bacon sees himself
exclusively as a character actor.
Sure, he starred in Footloose
that one time—35 years ago—
and it turned him for a moment
into a feathered-haired teen
idol, but he decided at some
point that he had no long-term
interest in headlining
blockbusters. “A leading man
is a man who, it doesn’t matter,”
he says. “You give him the
three Gs, which is the gun, the
girl, and the good lighting—
that man is going to be
eminently watchable. You’re