Q&A: Kevin Bacon

(Credit: James Bridges)

For the second time in a row, Kevin Bacon has stepped into the role a Marine. In "Frost/Nixon," Bacon played the brusque Jack Brennan, Nixon’s post-resignation chief of staff, who oversaw the interviews that David Frost conducted with the former President.

But here, in the eye-opening HBO film "Taking Chance," Bacon stars as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, the Marine who volunteered for the duty of escorting home the remains of Lance Corporal Chance Phelps in 2004, a process that is performed for each Marine casualty, but one most are very unfamiliar with. We recently joined a conference call with Bacon to discuss what it was like to walk in those shoes.

Though this is the second marine you’ve played in a row, I imagine the mood of the set after you wrapped for the day was much different from that of "Frost/Nixon." Is that true?
I take all the work seriously, but once in a while you do something that it has a little more weight to it. And certainly the story of Chance and of Mike and the people throughout history who have made this kind of sacrifice lends a certain importance to the story. So, when you come home from work over the course of shooting, there is something slightly different than just doing it for a regular movie. It just feels a little more important.

You’ve said you could never be a Marine. How far do you think you would have made it in boot camp?
I don’t think I would have made it very far. But that’s not the only thing I don’t think I could do. I couldn’t become an astronaut. I played an astronaut (in "Apollo 13") and within a half hour of starting to do the research and talking to people from NASA about what it takes to become an astronaut I was like, yeah, no way! [Laughs]

Is there a particular moment that moved you while shooting the film?
The experience of making the film wasn’t just one moment. It was compounded as we’d go from location to location but eventually, meeting and spending time with Chance’s family was incredibly moving. But the actual making of the film are similar sort of experiences that Col. Strobl had gone through. We would go from set to set with different extras and actors and even though there was nothing in our box, people were very moved by it. You’d be surprised at the end of six or seven weeks how many people came up to me and told me they have some kind of connection to somebody who was either in Iraq, had been in Iraq or had been killed. They would come up to me and say, I had no idea that this is the way it was handled, and thank you so much for making the movie. Which, for me, was kind of embarrassing, because it was all pretend and I’m an actor.

Embarrassing?
That feeling came up because somebody thanks for you for something and all you’re doing is acting in a part. Pretending. I’m a professional pretender. I take it seriously but it’s a job. I’m not throwing myself in harm’s way, nor am I going through what must be a sort of tortuous kind of process to return the remains of someone who has died to his family. So to have someone say to me thank you so much for doing this and for making this film, I felt don’t thank me. Thank Mike Strobl. Thank Chance Phelps.

Now, Taking Chance isn’t an Iraq war movie, but it does have connections to Iraq because that’s where Phelps died. Did working on this film have any impact on your thoughts about the war?
I don’t know if it’s really changed any of my feelings about that. I think that in general, if you go through life keeping your eyes and mind open and trying to stay educated, part of us changes all the time. That’s part of growing up. The experiences I’ve had as an actor, the places they have taken me physically and emotionally continue to inform what my opinions are. It’s not that there are politics on one side and work on the other. This specific process was completely foreign to me. It blew my mind to read about it and to see the painstaking care and respect that goes into transferring these remains. In a way, I was making the movie in the hopes that other people would have the same experience watching the film as I did making it.

"Taking Chance" premieres Saturday, February 21, at 8 p.m. on HBO.