Kevin Bacon Said “YES” to Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special Without Reading Script
More than three decades deep into marriage with fellow actor Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick really has nothing to offer by way of guidance.
Asked about the key to their 36-year union, she quipped on a March 2023 episode of E! News, “The secret is don’t take advice about how to keep a marriage going from a celebrity. That’s the secret.”
Well, then…
Proving that they are, as always, in lock step, her groom gave a similar answer when queried by Entertainment Tonight in 2015: “Whatever you do, don’t listen to celebrities on advice on how to stay married.”
Though, honestly, their shared mantra may just be a coverup for the fact that they don’t really have any novel new tips. They put in the effort, certainly, but theirs is a union that just…works. “I guess if I had to think too much about [our marriage], that would probably not be a good thing,” she explained to People. “We just got lucky. I honestly believe that’s the truth.”
Kinda hard to bottle up that stroke of good fortune. But if one were to read between the lines—or, say, do a thorough scour of every interview they have given—they’d land on a few constant truths.
So let’s talk about sex.
Because, really, they have no problem discussing it, crediting their enduring spark in the bedroom with helping them reach their Sept. 4 anniversary. “Sex is really important. That desire is there,” Sedgwick, 59, shared with Redbook in 2012. “The essence of it hasn’t really changed. When he walks into a room, I’m still… I mean, my heart gets a little fluttery and I think, Oh! He’s so cute. He’s so hot. That’s literally the first thing I think.”
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So, chemistry? Check. A certain affinity for each other is obviously important. And shared priorities plus a commitment to seeing this thing through.
The rest the actress chalks up to luck and careful adherence to a few rules: “Keep the fights clean, and don’t have sex with somebody else,” she detailed to Good Housekeeping in 2010. “Monogamy is a given, like ‘Put the toilet seat down.'”
Oddly, though, their union—which places them in the annals of history beside Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, the celebrity pairs who truly better never break up—wasn’t a certainty in the beginning.
When Sedgwick first laid eyes on Bacon, 66, on the set of the 1988 PBS remake of the play Lemon Sky, she kinda thought he was a jerk.
Well, actually, the first time they met, Sedgwick was a shy 12-year-old attempting to let the 19-year-old stage actor know she was impressed with his work. Bacon was grabbing some food at a deli post-performance and “a little girl was in there who had just seen the matinee, and her brother said, ‘You liked that actor, go tell him you liked him,'” the City on a Hill star recalled in a 2014 interview on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, “and it was Kyra.”
By their second introduction in 1987 she was relatively grown up, all of 22 with appearances on soap opera Another World and an episode of Miami Vice under her belt, and he was the 29-year-old alum of Diner, Animal House and Footloose, fresh off a longterm relationship with Pollan.
(Right around that time, incidentally, Pollan herself was remaking the acquaintance of her former Family Ties boyfriend and future husband Fox. So, all’s well that ends well and everything.)
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So the second time Sedgwick crossed paths with Bacon, he was boarding the van to their Cambridge, Mass., set, his black Labrador bounding on ahead of him. Sedgwick’s first thought, she recalled to Piers Morgan in a 2012 interview: “‘He’s really cocky and he thinks he’s so cool.'”
Her distaste registered, but Bacon was still besotted. “I found her, you know, really very beautiful and sexy and aloof,” he said during his own appearance on Morgan’s show. “And I was just immediately in love with her and she was just immediately put off by me.”
But he was convinced in that instant she was the one (“I was right,” he told Morgan) and so he was willing to put in the work.
And the money.
Proving himself the affable, giving type of movie star, he asked the whole Lemon Sky cast to join him for dinner on a regular basis. “He was very friendly and sweet and every night after work he would say, ‘Who wants to go out to dinner?’ And the whole cast would say yes except for me,” she recalled to Conan O’Brien in 2012. “And later on he told me that the only person he wanted to say yes was me and I never said yes and he was always stuck with the check, poor guy.”
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Undeterred, he attempted a new tactic. As they filmed a scene that required him to massage oil into her back, “He said to me, ‘You know you’re really tight. Have you ever had a massage?'” she shared with O’Brien. “Worst line ever.”
Learning she’d never indulged in the small luxury, he recommended the masseuse at his hotel: “He said, ‘You should make an appointment to go see her, and you know, it just so happens the massage room is in the gym and if I happen to be finished with my workout when you’re finished with your massage, maybe we can get dinner?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, sure, that’s not going to happen. I’m not going to tell him when my massage is.'”
Fast forward to that weekend when Sedgwick stumbled out of the spa only to spy a sweaty Bacon wrapping up his StairMaster workout. “I completely bought it. I thought it was just a coincidence,” she admitted. “Years later he told me he had actually called downstairs and asked when I was getting massaged, which is kind of creepy, but whatever.”
Because…it worked. “I had no great role models in terms of healthy marriages,” Sedgwick told Good Housekeeping, noting her venture capitalist dad and educator mom split when she was 3, “but I knew in my heart and soul that he was the right person. It was an unquestionable truth of mine. I’ve never had anything like that before or after.”
By the holidays the duo—both born the youngest of six with Philadelphia-bred Bacon growing up just a couple hours from Sedgwick’s New York City—were so confident in their pairing, the actor dropped an engagement ring into the toe of a stocking and proposed on Christmas Eve. “Shockingly,” he told PopEater in 2010, “she said yes.”
Sedgwick, too, sometimes marvels at their quick progression.
“If someone had told me that at 22 I was going to meet the man I was going to marry and at 23 I would marry him and have a child, I would have told them they were out of their mind,” she told Redbook in 2008. (Though there was one snag on the way to forever, Sedgwick confessing three months into their engagement that she actually hated the ring her future husband had chosen. “I talked her off the ledge,” Bacon revealed during a 2021 appearance on The Kelly Clarkson Show. “‘It’s all right, it’s all right, honey—we’ll go back. I don’t care—we’ll take it back.'”)
Perhaps spurred on by Bacon’s early proposal to just dive in and have a couple of kids, they were content to try a let’s-see-what-happens policy on their honeymoon and ended up as parents-to-be. “We were like, Let’s just not use birth control,” she recounted to More. “I didn’t think it was going to happen so fast. I got pregnant in two weeks.”
Son Travis Bacon arrived on June 23, 1989, and sister Sosie Bacon joined him on March 15, 1992 (they’ve both since enlisted in the family business with the 13 Reasons Why actress accepting a part in Mom’s Lifetime movie Story of a Girl and her actor-composer sibling producing the music), and suddenly the newlyweds were juggling steady acting careers with a new marriage and two toddlers.
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Those early years could be tough, Sedgwick has admitted. As she collected roles in 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, 1991’s Pyrates (with Bacon) and 1992’s Singles she struggled with the inevitable mom guilt.
“Work was complicated for me,” she told Good Housekeeping. “Every time I got a job, it was: Yay!—but kids, husband…what’s going to happen? I was always fraught with guilt, and it’s such a waste of an emotion. It keeps you out of the moment of being where you are, and I’ve had a lot of that over the years.”
To deal, she dove headfirst into therapy. With Bacon as her rock, “I did some real digging, which was not pleasant,” she shared. “I went to some dark places.” And, together, the couple put in the work on their marriage, agreeing early on that their union would be the main priority. They instituted candlelit family dinners (“It’s our time to share one another’s company—no electronics,” Bacon noted to Good Housekeeping) and kid-free date nights.
“I feel the primary relationship has to be the mother and the father, and then it can be the kids,” Sedgwick reasoned to Redbook. “Of course the kids come first in planning your life, but it’s incredibly important to keep your relationship as a couple strong and make time for it. It’s the foundation on which everything is built. Kids should know that your needs are important, because if they think your happiness lies only in them, that’s a lot of pressure on them.”
As young parents, they made it a point to line up a series of babysitters that would allow them to duck out for dinner or a show. “We were lucky that we had help and could go out on dates,” she has said. “We could leave the kids at home and have that time alone together.”
It was during that first decade of marriage that Sedgwick found her voice. Struggling with the quieter life afforded them at their rural Connecticut farmhouse, she was watching the Today show when she saw Katie Couric mention “that the mother is the emotional center of the family,” she recalled to Good Housekeeping. And that’s when it clicked—they simply had to move back to Manhattan.
“It was hard because I had grown up in a family where you do what the husband wants,” she explained. “But it was very remote where we lived, and we didn’t have a big social life. I needed the pulse of the city. My mental health was at stake…I was just like, ‘I am going crazy and we have to move back.'”
Her admission launched one of the couple’s rare fights, a battle they waged for some six months. But, she says, “We got through it just by knowing that no one was going anywhere.” Eventually they landed in the same spot: The city’s Upper West Side,
