Kevin Bacon Uses Google’s ‘Bacon Number’ to Remember Past Co-Stars
When you’ve appeared in enough films and TV shows to spawn a pop-culture trivia game, the scattered faces of your previous co-stars start to blur. So it’s only fitting that Kevin Bacon needs a little help jogging his clogged memory, as he explained during Monday’s Late Late Show. “If I’m about to go to work with someone, I’ll check their name on the call sheet, and then I’ll go to Google, and you can put in their name plus ‘bacon number,’ and that will tell you how many degrees of separation there are. It’ll tell [me] if I worked with them,” the actor told James Corden, referencing the search engine’s excellent “Baconator” tool.
With the subject fresh on their minds, Corden puts Bacon’s knowledge to the test in a game called “Who’s Your Co-Star,” challenging the actor to identify a bit player from 1992’s A Few Good Men out of a five-man line-up. That Oscar-nominated court drama featured an all-star cast – including Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore – but Corden saves his praise for “the jury foreman, who had an incredible, pivotal role.”
The bit actor, Jan Munroe, takes his place alongside four phonies, all of whom take turns delivering the line, “We have, sir.” Bacon analyzes the inflections of their line readings and theorizes about the possibilities of their beard lengths, but he follows his gut instinct for his final decision. “I remember that magical six weeks we had together,” he cracks, before making the right selection.
Turns out even Google can’t out-Bacon the real Baconator.