Kevin Bacon has spent 20 years bribing DJs not to play Footloose at parties. But now the actor turned director, who's also in a band and stars in his own parlour game, has other worries - like lost tourists and lookalike fans... Ian Tucker meets Hollywood's most irresistible scene-stealer

Kevin Bacon has a new thing. Sometimes as he's walking the streets of Manhattan, particularly around the Upper West Side area where he lives, he'll stop and help lost tourists find where they want to go. He spots them confused, examining maps, walks right up and asks if he can help. Just the other day, he tells me as we have breakfast on Amsterdam Avenue at his regular place, he helped a British girl find the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 'She was on the wrong side of the park,' he says.

A few days earlier he was out with his 13-year-old son, Travis, when they saw a couple of Japanese tourists clearly lost in Manhattan. They didn't speak much English and their guidebook was in Japanese, except for the addresses. They were looking for a particular restaurant on Times Square.

'I told them to take the subway, but they looked really scared,' says Bacon. So the star and his son helped them buy tickets and accompanied them on the subway. 'I was going that way anyhow,' he says. When they got to 42nd Street they found scaffolding and hoardings where the restaurant used to be. 'Their guidebook must have been old,' says Bacon.

Did they realise their guide was a famous Hollywood actor? 'I don't know. They were talking Japanese to each other.' But he didn't hear the words 'Kevin' and/or 'Bacon'.

During my cab journey up 8th Avenue to the Upper West Side to meet Kevin Bacon, I went over my questions, reminding myself of the things I should be asking him. Was Footloose a millstone or a milestone? The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, doesn't that cheese you off? Since JFK you've really turned your career around, specialising in edgy, tortured characters; how did you get there after all those tacky 80s films like Tremors and Flatliners? You've been married to the actress Kyra Sedgwick for 15 years - what's the secret of an enduring movie-industry marriage? How did working with the directors Jane Campion and Clint Eastwood differ on your upcoming films, In The Cut and Mystic River? Hanging out with fellow actors such as Sean Penn and Val Kilmer in early 80s New York - that must have been pretty wild, huh?

There are plenty of things I can ask Kevin Bacon about, but the thing I really want to ask him is, 'Kevin, do you think we kind of look alike?'

I'll explain. Five years ago I got a job on a youth/style magazine. Someone observed that there was a resemblance and I was christened 'Bacon'. Not that imaginative, granted, but the 'Bacon' moniker got finessed, improved upon. After a while it became 'Signor Pancetta' and sometimes shortened to 'Panch'.

At the first magazine Christmas lunch my place card was marked 'Footloose'; year two it was 'Panch'. So for the first time in my life, at the age of 31, I had a nickname. That I liked. All thanks to Kevin Bacon, or at least to Kevin Bacon's movie career, since if he'd become, say, a town planner, like his father, I'd have carried on having Bowie's mouth and no nickname. And to discuss Kevin Bacon's movie career is, after all, why we've arranged to meet.

Bacon has made 39 films since Footloose, including some great movies, such as Apollo 13 or Murder In The First, great performances in not so great movies, such as radio payola satire Telling Lies In America, and big box-office hits such as Hollow Man, but it's still Ren McCormack's overactive white sneakers that he's associated with. A city kid, McCormack moves to a small town where dancing has been outlawed. He romances the preacher's daughter and turns the town's youth on to a kind of rock'n'roll dancing that's never been seen before, or since. He almost didn't get the part, because in the opinion of Paramount executive Dawn Steel he wasn't 'fuckable' enough.

But he didn't take it personally. 'The studios, directors, casting directors, they pretty much want you to be the one you were in your last one. Before Footloose, the things I'd done, they weren't like... cute, you know what I mean? In Diner I was an alcoholic, and I don't look great in the movie. I hadn't done a lead kind of thing. And when she says you're not fuckable, that's basically it - you're not a leading man.'

But he snagged the part. The director, Herbert Ross, and the executive producer made him do a 'wardrobe test', trying on 'a whole bunch of outfits' to a rock soundtrack. Steel backed down. Today, Bacon, at 45, looks pretty good, but you can understand her reservations. The face is a little too angular, the eyes a cold, icy blue, and that grin... it's a tiny bit ambiguous.

So far Footloose has taken over $130m in box office and rentals. And in many ways Bacon's career ever since has been characterised by a struggle to leave Footloose behind. Two days before we met, Bacon went to Flushing Meadow to catch some tennis at the US Open. During a rain delay a TV commentator joined Bacon in the President's Box for a quick interview. When it became obvious that Footloose was the last and only movie of Bacon's that the presenter had seen, Bacon had to ask, 'You don't get out much to the movies do you?'

Later in the evening, during a match changeover, the DJ put Kenny Loggins' 'Footloose' on the PA system (something that wouldn't happen at a wedding or party Bacon was attending, because he'll slip the DJ a $20 bribe not to) and the TV cameras and lights turned on Bacon. The crowd was demanding that the actor get up from his seat and dance. After a while he folded. 'I gave them a little something,' he says. Or as NY Newsday put it the next day, 'They kicked off their Sunday shoes at the US Open.'

After Footloose Bacon made mistakes. He had moved from his native Philadelphia to Manhattan when he was 17. He'd studied acting at the prestigious Circle on the Square school, and a year before Footloose made his Broadway stage debut in The Slab Boys, with Val Kilmer and Sean Penn. He thought he knew it all.

'When I came to New York I already considered myself a man of wisdom and experience. I had an idea of this kind of actor that I should be. Someone who should be respected, serious, versatile, like Meryl Streep. That's basically what I thought I was going to do. Then all of a sudden I was like a pop star. I was on the cover of Seventeen, People, Us. But the choices that I started to make after Footloose were ill-advised. I didn't have a manager, I wasn't going to pay someone another 15 per cent to tell me what to do - I know what to do. As a result, it was almost like self-sabotage.'

Whereas the films Bacon appeared in pre-Footloose were often good, iconic even - Diner, Animal House, Friday the 13th - the movies he starred in post-Footloose were often bad, forgettable. For example, Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide records the 'barely released theatrically' White Water Summer, the 'unintentionally funny' Criminal Law, and the 'piffle' He Said, She Said.

Then there were two films that would later be re-evaluated as cult B-movies: killer worm horror Tremors and supernatural shocker Flatliners. And one funny, interesting movie called The Big Picture. This was the directorial debut of Spinal Tap co-writer Christopher Guest, a story of a young director (Bacon) who, on the basis of one student short movie, becomes the hottest property in Hollywood, then the coldest, and then the hottest again, simply because he stops returning his agent's phone calls. Bacon says the story line echoes his own post-Footloose experience, 'It was a very similar thing. Everything happens quickly, everyone's on the phone, "He's hot, he's hot" and then everyone's "He's not, he's not". I can't tell you how many times I'll go, "This is like The Big Picture!"'

Around this time Bacon experienced a turning point. He had just passed 30 and was standing with his wife on the corner of 86th Street and Broadway when he had a panic attack and collapsed on the sidewalk. He had not long been married to Sedgwick, they had a honeymoon pregnancy, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer, he was in Tremors, a movie about underground worms, and 'my career felt like it was completely in the shitter'. He felt under financial pressure. 'Things weren't turning out how I wanted them.' Kyra told him, 'It's OK honey, it'll be all right.'

He married Sedgwick, seven years his junior, in 1988. The daughter of a venture capitalist, they met while filming a TV movie called Lemon Sky (you may recall her as Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Born on the Fourth of July or with John Travolta in Phenomenon). She told In Style magazine that it wasn't love at first sight: 'All he screamed to me was image.' But a few months and one engagement ring delivered in a stocking later and her mind was changed. They have a rule that however complex their schedules they never spend more than two weeks apart as a family. In 2000, he told an American paper, 'When I met her, I didn't think I needed anyone. But I did. I needed her.' They recently celebrated their 15th anniversary.

After the panic attack it was time to reappraise. Bacon's agent at the time was also Oliver Stone's. Stone was casting JFK. Bacon had it in his head that because he was the lead - a successful lead - in Footloose he should be the lead in everything else. People thought he didn't do small parts. His agent reminded Bacon of how she used to see him on the stage in New York playing edgy roles - junkies, male prostitutes. She told him they should look for something small, something character driven, and as Bacon says, 'Oliver had a shit-load of parts in that movie'. Bacon got cast as Willie O'Keefe, 'a crazy, gay prisoner'.

In one sneering, sleazeball scene Bacon stole the movie. It helped that he had the most memorable line in the film, delivered to Kevin Costner: 'You don't know shit Mr Garrison, 'cos you ain't never been fucked in the ass.' As Bacon says, 'People were like, "I've never seen him do that before".'

And from there on, Bacon has specialised in non-headlining, often troubled roles. He was a military lawyer in the Cruise/Nicholson court martial face-off A Few Good Men and In The River Wild his Meryl Streep-bothering convict earned him a Golden Globe nomination. In Murder in the First, often cited as his finest work, he steals the film from Christian Slater and Gary Oldman with his depiction of an Alcatraz inmate accused of murdering a fellow prisoner. He was 'livid' when the distributors postponed its release and he missed out on a predicted Oscar nomination. He provided a complex counterpoint to Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 as substitute astronaut Jack Swigert. And then, just to make it really clear he'd left Footloose cutesyness behind, he took a role in Sleepers, in which he played a boys' home guard who asks a 12-year-old boy for a blow job. In Wild Things, for which he was executive producer, he played a double-crossing detective, then came full circle to become the leading man again; firstly in supernatural thriller Stir of Echoes, then in Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi Hollow Man, which has taken $191m worldwide.

I mention to Bacon that it's been said that from JFK onwards he has often stolen scenes and movies from the leading actors. 'I didn't know that has often been said,' he says, looking a little uncomfortable. Some might say that you've stolen three movies off Gary Oldman: Criminal Law, JFK and Murder in the First. He gives the answer he has to give: 'Gary Oldman is impossible to steal a movie from. He's such a great actor, he's off the hook. I love him.'

But you're back at the top of the poster.

'We'll see how long that lasts,' he says.

Bacon wanted the lead role in Jane Campion's risqué thriller In The Cut. He begged and pleaded for the chance to play the detective who gets mixed up with Nicole Kidman (who later dropped out, Meg Ryan taking her place). 'It was a role I wanted more than anything for a long time,' he says, 'except for Mystic River'. He wrote Campion a letter, but he didn't get the part. Mark Ruffalo did. Instead, Campion offered him the role of Meg Ryan's stalker. 'I was like, "Fuck that", but then I thought, "Wait a second, this is what I like to do - which is cool, weird characters with great directors - and it's in New York, right down the street. So I said yes.' And it was a good call: he makes a convincing, nervy stalker - the sideways smile and cold stare are put to good use.

In the Clint Eastwood-directed Mystic River, along with Tim Robbins and Sean Penn, he's part of a trio of boyhood friends who are thrust back together as adults after the murder of Penn's daughter. Bacon is the detective assigned to the case. While Robbins over-hams and eggs it, and Sean Penn is Robert De Niro, Bacon starts out as the grey, straight guy but gradually reveals conflicts and complexities that make his character the compelling centre of the film.

Bacon is now preparing to direct his second movie. In 1996 he directed Losing Chase, a domestic drama that starred his wife and Helen Mirren, earning the latter a Golden Globe. Soon he'll start work on Loverboy, again starring Sedgwick, this time as an over-smothering mother. In the meantime he'll be appearing in The Woodsman, as a paedophile returning to his home town after 12 years in prison, and as a doomed rock singer boyfriend of Sedgwick's in Cavedweller, an adaptation of a Dorothy Allison novel. That's a lot of troubled, dark stuff.

'What I'd really like to do now is get the girl, shoot the gun, drive the car, have fun,' says Bacon. 'I even have these kind of action dreams, where I'm the action guy. That said, the next thing will be a tortured role.'

Kevin Bacon is not only an actor, he's a game. Back in January 1994 three students at Pennsylvania's Albright college with too much time on their hands floated the idea that you could link any actor to Kevin Bacon via the actors with whom they'd shared the screen. For example, John Wayne has a Bacon number of two: Wayne was in The Longest Day with Robert Wagner, Wagner was in Wild Things with Bacon. They took their game on to MTV and Bacon appeared with the students.

'At first he thought we were stalkers or freaks,' one of them said, 'but then he had fun with it.'

The game became associated with the Six Degrees of Separation theory, that you can link any two people in the world by six interpersonal relationships, and it became known as Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In fact, it's hard to find a well-known actor with a Bacon number higher than two.

Inevitably, the game was put on the internet, by students from the computer science department from the University of Virginia. On their site you can learn that three unnamed actors have a Bacon number of eight. However, although Bacon has appeared in a lot of movies with a lot of actors, he is not the centre of the movie universe. That would be Rod Steiger. Bacon is the 1,222nd best centre of the movie universe. 'There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content. It's just a concept. I think that's such a cool thing,' says Bacon. 'It's a bizarre thing. I thought it was going to go away a long time ago.'

In 1996 one of the Virginia students, Brett Tjaden, met Bacon. He had heard that Bacon thought the game was at his expense. But they appeared on the Discovery Channel playing the game together. Bacon told him he was very happy about it. Tjaden praised his performance in Footloose. Bacon said, 'Well, thank you, but I've done other movies since then.'

'To be honest,' Tjaden said afterwards, 'I haven't seen more than two or three of his movies.'

Kevin Bacon is also in a band. He and his older brother Michael, an Emmy-winning soundtrack composer, and four other musicians call themselves the Bacon Brothers. They have released three albums and are about to release a concert CD Live: No Food Jokes Tour. The second time I meet him we're in Baltimore at a baseball game. After the game the Bacon Brothers are playing a gig. Sat in the band's box with the other group members and their girlfriends and kids, Bacon explains the rules of baseball and asks about the Darkness. Occasionally a member of the ground staff enters and requests a photo with Bacon or an autograph; he always obliges. The underdog Baltimore Orioles beat the Seattle Mariners 2-1.

The band is playing on a makeshift stage on the plaza outside the ground. A crowd of around 300 people stop by, have a beer and see the movie star in the flesh. Bacon and his brother both write songs and sing. Kevin sometimes plays guitar, sometimes the bongos. His songs tend towards straight-up American rock, blue-collar freeway music. The crowd go for anti-vamp sing-along 'I'm So Glad I'm Not Married'. Michael, often playing a cello, performs more low-key, introspective songs, like love-them-right number 'Baby Steps'. After the first song a number of people in the audience yell, 'Do "Footloose"'.

Afterwards, Michael is realistic about their audience. 'When we started out playing it was 100 per cent people coming to stare at my brother. Now it's probably 50 to 70 per cent coming to stare at my brother.'

Until recently, the Bacon Brothers didn't enjoy playing in Los Angeles. The first time they did was at Elizabeth Taylor's 65th birthday in February 1997 - a televised charity fundraising extravaganza that featured Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart and Roseanne Barr being carried around by shirtless musclemen in Egyptian costumes. The Bacon Brothers were performing with the country singer Martina McBride. The rehearsal went perfectly. But by the time they did their opening song for real, 'A Woman's Got A Mind To Change', Kevin's guitar was totally out of tune. 'It was basically a big mess,' says Michael. 'We didn't play the song well. Afterwards Kevin felt embarrassed and got depressed about it.' The band suspected sabotage. McBride told them she would come and sing with them at LA's Troubadour club the next night to make it better, 'but she never showed up,' says Michael.

Kevin says many of their gigs have been disastrous. 'I find there's the most resistance to an actor singing. It's like I'm being disloyal to my industry. Not many people show. You'd think I'd have friends or something that'd show up. The people who do show up throw scripts on stage.'

For an encore the Bacon Brothers often do a medley of rock anthems, climaxing with 'Footloose'.

Two days earlier, at breakfast, I'd been thinking about how lucky I was. Most people with an alleged lookalike can only really run a slide rule over the resemblance by looking at them on TV, in magazines. I, however, am sitting opposite mine. Do we look alike? Well, yeah, kinda. There's the upturned nose, the angular bone structure and the thin lips that break into a smile, that doesn't always look 100 per cent wholesome (Kevin has turned this into a money-making attribute). Later, I notice we have the same style of Ray-Bans. I reason this must be because we have the same shape face. I do note, however, the outline of Bacon's pecs through his black T-shirt. You can't say the same for me. His nine years' seniority makes me feel a bit ashamed and I resolve to join a gym when I get back to London. If I look like that at 45, I'll be pleased.

Breakfast over, Bacon suggests we go for a walk in Central Park. As we walk towards the park I decide it's time to explain.

'This interview has an extra dimension for me,' I tell him. 'A few years ago I got a new job on a magazine, and it was the kind of place where every body had nicknames relating to what they did, how they behaved, or something.'

'And yours was Kevin Bacon?'

'Yeah, it was Bacon.'

'Because you looked like me? That's funny. That's great. That's brilliant.'

'It started off as Bacon, and after a while it became Signor Pancetta.'

'That's funny, because tocino is actually the Spanish, and I have a couple of friends who call me Señor Tocino.'

'Then it got shortened to Panch.'

'Panch? That's funny.'

'Maybe at the time I had longer hair, and I got stopped in bars all the time, people saying, "You look like that... that actor... you know, Footloose... er, Kevin Bacon!" Once on a tube train late at night, a drunk girl told me I looked like Kevin Bacon and started singing "Footloose" at the top of her voice. The whole carriage was looking at me and pointing.'

'That's hysterical. Now you know what I'm talking about. Now you know what an albatross it [Footloose] is. Someone asked me the other day, "Is it a millstone around your neck?" And I said, "I guess so. I'll go with that, millstone."'

I ask Bacon if I can have my picture taken with him. 'Sure,' he says. 'Let's find us a tourist.'

'Lost ones, with maps,' I suggest.

Sure enough, 10 yards ahead two men in shorts are unfolding a map on top of a wall. Bacon walks right up. 'Hi, are you lost?' he asks.

'You're Kevin Bacon! This is unbelievable!' says one, shrieking slightly.

'What are you looking for?' he says. Hands are shaken as they introduce themselves as Trey and Stephen from Illinois. They are looking for Ground Zero. Trey realises something. He knows an attorney who lived next door to the house where they filmed Hollow Man. A random member of the public with a Bacon factor of 2.

'This is amazing,' Trey still can't believe this is happening. They tell Bacon he was 'fabulous' in Will & Grace. He gives them some directions.

I take Bacon's picture with Stephen and Trey, and Trey takes my picture with Bacon. 'This is amazing. Last time we were in New York we met Toni Collette,' Trey says. Both parties say goodbye. No one has mentioned Footloose.

· Mystic River is out now. In The Cut is released on 31 October. For information on his band, go to www.baconbros.com