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60 free Kevin Bacon trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Kevin Bacon born and raised?
Philadelphia
He left home at 17 for New York theater; his hometown later hosted the first Bacon Brothers gig at the Theatre of Living Arts.
Q 02Kevin Bacon is the youngest of how many children?
Six
His mother Ruth was an elementary school teacher and liberal activist; his brother Michael is his bandmate.
Q 03Bacon's father, Edmund Bacon, was famous in what profession?
Urban planner
As executive director of Philadelphia's City Planning Commission he shaped Penn Center and Society Hill, and wrote the classic text Design of Cities.
Q 04Bacon made his feature film debut in which 1978 comedy?
Animal House
Fame did not follow; he went back to waiting tables and did stints on the soaps Search for Tomorrow and Guiding Light.
Q 05In which 1980 slasher film did Bacon play a camp counselor?
Friday the 13th
His character Jack meets his end with an arrow through the throat from below the bunk while Marcie is in the bathroom.
Q 06How is Bacon's camp-counselor character Jack killed in the 1980 slasher?
An arrow through the throat
Ned's corpse is already lying in the bunk above him and Marcie at the time, one of the film's most imitated shocks.
Q 07Bacon made his Broadway debut in Slab Boys alongside which two then-unknown actors?
Sean Penn and Val Kilmer
Two decades later he would send up his own game on Will & Grace by connecting himself to Kilmer via Tom Cruise.
Q 08For which 1982 play did Bacon win an Obie Award?
Forty Deuce
He also performed Getting Out and Flux in New York around the same time, before Diner changed his career.
Q 09Which character did Bacon play in Barry Levinson's Diner (1982)?
Timothy Fenwick
The role, alongside Steve Guttenberg, Mickey Rourke and Ellen Barkin, made critics take notice and led straight to Footloose.
Q 10What is the name of Bacon's character in Footloose?
Ren McCormack
He is a Chicago kid who moves to a small town where dancing has been banned.
Q 11How did Bacon prepare for his Footloose role?
He enrolled at a high school as a transfer student
He used his character's name, studied the teenagers, then left in the middle of the day.
Q 12Footloose is loosely based on a real dancing ban in which Oklahoma town?
Elmore City
The town had banned dancing since 1898 to curb heavy drinking; the film moves the story to fictional Bomont, Utah.
Q 13Which two actors were slated for the Footloose lead before Bacon?
Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe
Q 21In A Few Good Men (1992), Bacon played what role in the courtroom?
The prosecuting attorney
He faced off against Tom Cruise's defense while Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup took the stand.
Q 22Bacon earned a 1994 Golden Globe nomination for The River Wild opposite which actress?
Meryl Streep
He called it a grueling shoot in which every cast member fell out of the boat at some point and had to be rescued.
Q 23Which real astronaut did Bacon play in Apollo 13 (1995)?
Jack Swigert
Swigert was the backup command module pilot who replaced Mattingly days before launch; Bacon flips the fateful oxygen-tank stir switch.
Producers loved Cruise's Risky Business underwear dance but he was busy with All the Right Moves; Lowe auditioned three times.
Q 14How many doubles did Bacon say he had for the famous warehouse dance in Footloose?
Four
A stunt double, a dance double and two gymnastics doubles, by his own count.
Q 15Who played the dance-banning Reverend Shaw Moore in Footloose?
John Lithgow
Dianne Wiest played his wife Vi and Lori Singer their daughter Ariel, a part Madonna also auditioned for.
Q 16Which Deniece Williams song from Footloose was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar?
Let's Hear It for the Boy
Kenny Loggins's title song was nominated too; both lost to Stevie Wonder's 'I Just Called to Say I Love You'.
Q 17Bacon had a cameo in which 1987 John Hughes comedy?
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
He is the man who beats Steve Martin to the taxi. He then starred in Hughes's She's Having a Baby the following year.
Q 18In which 1990 movie did Bacon's character save a desert town from underground 'graboid' monsters?
Tremors
Reba McEntire made her acting debut in it; the franchise later spawned six direct-to-video sequels without him.
Q 19In Joel Schumacher's Flatliners (1990), Bacon plays a medical student who does what?
Experiments with near-death
He, Julia Roberts and Kiefer Sutherland stop their own hearts to glimpse the afterlife and bring back more than they bargained for.
Q 20Which character did Bacon play in Oliver Stone's JFK (1991)?
Willie O'Keefe
Taking the small role of a gay prostitute was part of his deliberate 1991 shift from leading man to character actor in 'A' pictures.
Q 24Who directed Apollo 13?
Ron Howard
Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris co-starred in the docudrama, adapted from Jim Lovell's book Lost Moon.
Q 25What was Bacon's directorial debut, a 1996 television film?
Losing Chase
It was nominated for three Golden Globes and won one; his second film as director, Loverboy, came in 2005.
Q 26On the 1998 thriller Wild Things, Bacon took a supporting role and also served as what?
Executive producer
He followed it with the ghost story Stir of Echoes, directed by David Koepp.
Q 27Who directed Hollow Man (2000), in which Bacon's scientist Sebastian Caine turns himself invisible?
Paul Verhoeven
Most of the roughly $95 million budget went to the visual effects that peel Bacon away layer by layer.
Q 28Who directed Mystic River (2003), in which Bacon starred with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins?
Clint Eastwood
Penn and Robbins both won Oscars; Bacon played state police detective Sean Devine.
Q 29Which actor was first cast as Det. Sean Devine in Mystic River before leaving the film?
Michael Keaton
He had already done script readings and researched the Massachusetts State Police before departing.
Q 30In the acclaimed 2004 drama The Woodsman, Bacon played what kind of character?
A sex offender on parole
The role earned him an Independent Spirit nomination for best actor; his wife co-starred and the Bacon Brothers contributed a song.