Other notable credits include Friday the 13th (1980), Tremors (1990), The River Wild (1994), The Woodsman (2004), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Patriots Day (2016).

Bacon played the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017; he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show.

[13] In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce,[14] and soon afterward he made his Broadway debut in Slab Boys, with then-unknowns Sean Penn and Val Kilmer.

[13] Richard Corliss of TIME likened Footloose to the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause and the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, commenting that the film includes "motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement, and Bible Belt vigilantism.

"[16] To prepare for the role, Bacon enrolled at a high school as a transfer student named "Ren McCormick" and studied teenagers before leaving in the middle of the day.

[18] Bacon's critical and box office success led to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had difficulty shaking this on-screen image.

He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth "graboid" monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors,[21] and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.

[13] By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor.

"The only way I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel.

"[22] He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK[23] and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men.

[13] Bacon made his debut as a director with the television film Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, and won one.

[27] Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China[13] and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America.

[13] As the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.

He was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in The Woodsman (2004), for which he was nominated for best actor and received the Independent Spirit Award.

He appeared in the HBO Films production of Taking Chance (2009), based on an eponymous story written by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, an American Desert Storm war veteran.

On July 15, 2010, it was confirmed that Bacon would appear in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class as mutant villain Sebastian Shaw.

[35][36] The film was released in 2011, the same year as the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid, Love, in which Kevin portrayed a co-worker involved in an affair.

In March 2012, Bacon was featured in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, 8 – a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage – as Attorney Charles J.

[37] The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.

[45] Beginning in 2012, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for EE in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles.

[51] Bacon has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 4, 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky.

[58][59] Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011, via their appearance on the PBS TV series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, that they are ninth cousins, once removed.