After nearly three decades of marriage, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick don’t believe in leaving their work on the studio lot. So when Ms. Sedgwick prepared for her directorial debut with Lifetime’s “Story of a Girl,” airing on Sunday, July 23, she not only asked Mr. Bacon for his opinion about the project, but she also cast him in it.

But not long into shooting, she told him to back off. “People are extremely tapped into trying to get an inside look at our relationship, and she wanted to make sure that the crew understood that she was in charge,” Mr. Bacon said. “And so she said, ‘You’ve got to just cool it with the taking-over thing.’ And I heard her loud and clear.”

In “Story of a Girl,” Ryann Shane plays a teenager battered by slut-shaming in the three years since a sex video she made at 13 went viral. Hoping to rectify her past, she takes a job at a pizzeria owned by Mr. Bacon’s character, a fatherly straight shooter with secrets of his own.

In an interview at The New York Times, Mr. Bacon, 59 — good-naturedly waving to gawkers beyond a conference room window — talked about collaborating with his wife, his latest turn as a sex object and his resurrection of a long-ago role. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.