The 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).

Jacket, $6,595, Pants, $1,195, by Giorgio Armani / Tank Top, $40 (for pack of three), by Calvin Klein Underwear / Belt, $495, by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello / Sunglasses, $440, by Ahlem / Watch, $8,600 by Omega / Necklace, $265, Ring, $395, by David Yurman Coat, $2,950, and pants, $1,340, by Haider Ackerman / Boots, $1,095, and sunglasses, $330, by Giorgio Armani

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 offer 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 Affleck-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.”

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Kevin Bacon Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

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 going to want to see everything that that person does. That's not me.”

Say what you will of the concept of the “three Gs” (“I made it up, just now,” he says with a grin, when I tell him it's clever), Bacon's notorious ubiquity across three decades in Hollywood is surprising, if only because he's held the place at arm's length for years. He never wanted to live in Los Angeles. And so he and his wife, the actor and director Kyra Sedgwick, who married in 1988, raised their two children, Travis and Sosie, in New York City. Both Bacon and Sedgwick, as he tells me, “defined ourselves” by never going all in on Hollywood, by steering clear of all that.