For Kevin Bacon, the 30th anniversary of his blockbuster film Apollo 13 couldn’t have come at a more uncanny time.
The 1995 Ron Howard-directed drama about astronauts aboard the 1970 moon-bound spacecraft who experience an accident that has mission control scrambling for a way to get them back to Earth, had striking similarities to recent news about U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. After spending an unexpected nine months in space, the pair finally returned home on March 18, much longer than the originally planned eight days.
“I did feel for those people,” Bacon, who stars in The Bondsman on Prime Video, told Yahoo Entertainment. “Especially in their case, where you took off and you thought you were coming right back home.”
“There must’ve been such a challenge for everybody involved,” he added. “I guess that’s part of what you signed up for and the courage it takes to go up there.”
While Bacon, who plays a demon bounty hunter in the new horror-comedy series that starts streaming April 3, said he “doesn’t really think back on my movies that much unless I’m being asked to remember,” he acknowledged that he’s had to do that more than a few times, given his long career.
“I’ve made so many movies that they keep having these anniversaries. I just had the 40th of this one and the 25th of that one,” he said. “It’s like, there’s a weird thing that happens in one’s life, I think, as time moves on.”
In his latest project, about murdered Georgia bounty hunter Hub Halloran who’s been resurrected by the devil to destroy demons and send them back to hell, Bacon also plays a father to a teen son (Maxwell Jenkins) and ex-husband to Maryanne, played by country music singer Jennifer Nettles. The man who orchestrated his killing (Damon Herriman) is now dating his ex and wants him out of the picture by any means necessary.
Killing demons in a variety of gory ways meant that Bacon, who is also an executive producer on the show, performed many of his own stunts — some he literally dove into.
“Battling the demon cheerleader underwater is like, it’s one of those moments where you go, ‘God, I got the coolest gig in the world. This is so fun and weird and hard and physical and cold,’” Bacon said, referring to one of his fight scenes. “But at the end of the day, that feeling that between the woman playing the cheerleader and our underwater camera crew and our regular crew and our directors and our stunt people, you go like, ‘Yeah, we did something unusual today.’”
Music also plays a pivotal role in the series. In addition to killing demons, which becomes a family affair with Hub’s mother (Beth Grant) along with his ex-wife and son, the bounty hunter also writes and performs songs with Maryanne. Bacon himself is one-half of folk-rock duo the Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael.
Nettles told Yahoo Entertainment that collaborating with the multi-hyphenate on the show’s music was a big thrill for her.
“It was very natural. It was very easy. He is a fantastic writer,” Nettles said of working with her co-star. “He is an amazing lyricist, storyteller and musician. And we really had a very natural and immediate flow with each other.”
Kevin Bacon and Jennifer Nettles in The Bondsman. (Tina Rowden /Amazon/MGM Studios/Courtesy Everett Collection)
While Nettles typically doesn’t opt for “slasher stuff,” she said being a part of those scenes in The Bondsman made for some of her favorite moments on set.
“Whenever there’s blood and gore and everything all over all of us, as actors, obviously, that’s a big part of the show,” Nettles said. “So people are walking around looking crazy half the time. That’s very, very fun.”
With scenes featuring squished heads and slit throats held together by duct tape, Bacon said it’s all part of the show’s mix of horror and comedy.
“The gore is so over the top that it kind of leans into the humor of what we’re trying to do,” he said. “That’s just the tone of this show, which is just fun.”
All eight episodes of The Bondsman are available to stream April 3 on Prime Video.
