Kevin Bacon and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick, may be best known for their smash films such as Footloose and Phenomenon, respectively, but to their kids, Travis, 29, and Sosie, 26, growing up, they were just Dad and Mom.
“We didn’t talk to our kids about our work. And they never watched our movies,” the Golden Globe winner, 60, told Us Weekly exclusively at a TCA press tour at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California, on Thursday, January 31. “I mean, yeah, they were on sets … they were probably in their face, just by trickle down, but it wasn’t like we were like, ‘Come, look at this thing I did, look at this thing I did!’” he said. “We tried to really keep that separate.”
The couple’s youngest child shared a similar sentiment with Us in November 2013. “I don’t really watch a lot of my parents’ movies,” she said at the time. “When I was little, their movies were so inappropriate. It was all R-rated, so I wasn’t allowed to watch any of them and now it’s gone on that way.”
In fact, despite casting daughter Sosie in the film The Closer at age 10, Bacon said he and Sedgwick, 53, inadvertently led their children away from acting.
“I think that somehow, my wife and I must have given them the message that this is not a gig. There’s going to be too much rejection. There’s going to be too much judgment … You don’t want your kids to have a hard time. It’s unreasonable, because that’s not what life is.”
Nowadays, however, the musician says it’s a different story. “Now we can actually have some experience, talks,” he told Us of Sosie’s blossoming acting career. (She starred in the first two seasons of Netflix’s hit series 13 Reasons Why.) “And we can actually talk about what our experience was like in certain ways, and she’s interested in that.”
Still, Bacon says he’s sure to remind the former Miss Golden Globes 2014 that her experience will differ from his. “What I always say to her every single time is, ‘In any kind of career and in life, her process is going to be a very different process from my process. This is what happened to me, but this is not the journey you either need to take or will take.’ And she already sees that. She’s a very independent person. Both of my children. And yet kids in their 20s, I love it because we communicate as adults.”
In addition to personal differences, the Following alum says the landscape has changed from the one that his star rose in. “Young people, and specifically young women, have the ability if they want to, to generate their own material,” he explained to Us. “To create a career that’s not 100 percent based on sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring. Now, her mother, even in her 20s, was producing things. So, she was kind of ahead of her time in that way as an actress. Looking for material, looking for stories to develop. And one of the first things that she ever produced was a film for Showtime that she hired me to direct. And Helen Mirren got her first Golden Globe for it. And that was a piece of material that Kyra found and generated so that she could act, and I think that Sosie lives in a world and in an industry where there’s more opportunities in terms of that.”
With reporting by Amanda Champagne
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