Kevin Bacon

Six Degrees of Separation

Shot at Milk Studios in New York

Donald Trump has a Bacon Number of two. Ditto Kim Kardashian. Vladimir Putin? His is three. If you type almost any famous person’s name into Google followed by “Bacon Number”, it will tell you how connected they are to the actor Kevin Bacon.

Before the fun was taken out of it by algorithms, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” was a good game to play if you were a movie buff. Inspired by “six degrees of separation” – the theory that says nobody is more than six people away from any other person in the world – the game was devised back in 1994 by three classmates at Albright College in Pennsylvania, while idly watching a Mr Bacon movie marathon on TV.

In this short, I tentatively asked if he’d like to play against himself.

“When I die,” he said, “the newspapers will say: ‘Actor Kevin Bacon, dead: no Oscars, but at least he has a game named after him.’”