Kevin Bacon and his wife Kyra Sedgwick discovered they’re actually distant cousins. Awkward.
The 65-year-old star is actually fairly well-known for his interconnectedness with the 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' game, which is based upon the assumption that just about everybody in the film industry can be linked through their movie roles to Bacon within six steps or fewer.
But even taking that into consideration, I reckon it was probably still a big shock for him to find out that his wife of 35-years is actually his cousin.
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However, that’s exactly what happened back in 2013 when he and Sedgwick appeared on Finding Your Roots - an American ancestry TV show that’s similar to the British series Who Do You Think You Are?
On the show, presenter Henry Louis Gates Jr showed Sedgwick a photo of her ninth cousin once removed and announced: “And his name is Kevin Bacon.”
In response, Sedgwick, who had already expressed concerns that the show would reveal them to be related, said: “See. I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!”
However, she added: “As long as we’re not first cousins, it’s fine.”
Elsewhere in the show, Bacon is told: “You and Brad Pitt are 13th cousins twice removed.
“You and President Obama share a common ancestor named Anthony Woolhouse. You are 12th cousins, three times removed.”
“No kidding. I knew I wasn’t getting enough respect," the actor responded.
Bacon has previously admitted that he didn’t like the concept of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as he initially felt it was a joke at his expense.
Speaking on the On With Mario Lopez podcast last year, he explained: “I was horrified! Because I thought it was really a joke at my expense. I just thought, ‘Oh come on, they’re just making fun of me, let’s face it!’”
Sharing how he first came to discover the game, he continued: “I heard about it, people would come up to me and say, ‘My cousin invented a game about you,’ or, ‘I’m so hungover, I was playing your game last night’. I had no idea what they were talking about, I was like, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong guy.’”
Bacon went on to say that he assumed it would have died off by now, but the game is still widely played.
“It’s hard to imagine, but we didn’t have the same – if something went viral, we didn’t really use that word,” he said.
“Viral was a virus, it wasn’t an idea! But it spread and spread and spread, and I honestly thought it was gonna go away, and it just didn’t go away!”
Claire Reid