‘The Bondsman’ clip: Kevin Bacon gets hellish job in streaming show
Kevin Bacon plays a bail enforcer who dies and learns he’s got a new job – hunting escaped demons for the devil – in Amazon series “The Bondsman.”
Some good news for Satan: He’s now one degree from Kevin Bacon.
Equal parts supernatural horror procedural, workplace comedy and Southern gothic family drama, “The Bondsman” (now streaming on Amazon Prime) stars Bacon as Hub Halloran, a Georgia bail enforcer with a mysterious past who’s killed in the line of duty and resurrected by the devil to hunt demons who’ve escaped from hell.
It’s a role that gives Bacon, 66, a chance to showcase his musical side while playing the hero, even if it’s a more ornery one than most.
“A lot of times I’m the bad guy, which I’m totally fine about. I love that, too,” Bacon says. But Hub was appealing because “he was kicking ass, but also internally has a real kind of dark streak to him in terms of the stuff that’s in his past and his … failure to move forward with his life. He’s a guy who is so stubborn that he’s ended up living in his mother’s garage and given up this music career and (failed) at his marriage.”
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Halloran works with his mom Kitty (Beth Grant), keeps an eye on ex-wife Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles) and makes an enemy of her criminal boyfriend Lucky (Damon Herriman). He’s sort of a bad guy who, over the course of eight episodes, figures out how to be a better person, literally facing his demons and sins along the way.
“Maybe it’s an overused term, but it is a story of redemption,” Bacon says. Right out of the gate, “you’ve seen that he’s been in hell. Was it a mistake or was it not a mistake? In a very matter of fact way, my mother says, ‘Hub, did you die?’ ‘Yeah, I think maybe I did.’ It’s not like anybody’s freaking out about the conversation. It’s just, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with this.”
Music is baked into the series. Bacon, an executive producer, whipped out a guitar or mandolin to play “Ain’t No Grave,” popularized by Johnny Cash, to help sell the show in Zoom pitch meetings. And the casting of Nettles sparked the possibility of bringing together two of his artistic passions in a significant way.
“I feel lucky to get a chance to sing with her, basically,” Bacon says of the Grammy-winning country artist, one-half of the duo Sugarland. “She’s that good that she can make me sound good.”
Bacon and Nettles teamed up to write several tunes, though only three of them ended up in the show: One is featured in a flashback featuring Hub and Maryanne, while Nettles has a show-stopping solo number that’s key to Maryanne’s story. Yet there were so many songs that didn’t make it (and they didn’t want to ditch), Bacon and Nettles crafted an EP, “The Bondsman: Hell and Back” (out Friday), that serves as a soundtrack.
“When you have four hours to kill demons, figure out the situation in this family and tell the story of Hub’s redemption, it’s a lot to cover,” Bacon says. “If we’re lucky enough to get a second season, I hope we can keep exploring the music.”
With brother Michael, Kevin’s Bacon Brothers brand will tour this summer, and they’re pondering a second live album. His acting career’s busy, too: In a “complete 180” from “The Bondsman,” Bacon stars in the female-fronted Netflix limited series “Sirens” (May 22), playing a billionaire while wearing “pastel clothes that cost a bunch of money,” he says, and is the villain in summer horror comedy “The Toxic Avenger” (Aug. 29).
He’s also hoping to finish “Family Movie,” a project Bacon, wife Kyra Sedgwick and kids Travis and Sosie have been working on since the pandemic lockdown about a clan that makes horror movies.
While Bacon might be more widely know as the “Footloose” dude, scary subject matter has been his low-key bread and butter since getting gruesomely impaled by an arrow in 1980’s original “Friday the 13th” movie. So “The Bondsman” is very much his kind of jam, both as an actor and as a fan.
“Maybe the first movie I ever went to with a girl was Vincent Price’s ‘House of Wax’ in 3D,” says Bacon, whose childhood was rife with late-night horror flicks on TV and plastic model kits of the Universal Monsters. “From an acting standpoint, it’s always life and death. You always have the challenges of, are you going to survive this thing? And how are you going to tell the story of the lead character’s terror?
“I would love to make the perfect romantic comedy or a great action film or historical drama or whatever it is, (but) horror’s just a genre that I dig, and I’m happy to go back to it.”
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