In the summer of 2024, in the interests of research, Kevin Bacon took on his most demanding and dangerous role to date. He put on a fake nose, inserted a set of false teeth and play-acted the part of an ordinary man. For a few terrifying hours at a Los Angeles shopping mall, the Mystic River star went completely Method, mixing with the shoppers outside Foot Locker and experiencing the full feral horror of everyday life. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” he would later tell a reporter. “I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a f***ing coffee or whatever.” The role understandably took an immediate toll on his system. “I was like, this sucks,” he recalled thinking. “I want to go back to being famous.”
I was reminded of Bacon’s gruelling social experiment while watching the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays an A-list Hollywood actor on his way to collect a lifetime achievement in Tuscany. Naturally, Jay Kelly never has to wait in line for coffee. At one stage he even gets one he hasn’t asked for slid into his hand by a passing poolside butler. He is wealthy and handsome and pampered and indulged. Which is to say that he’s basically George Clooney and that the Oscar-winning actor is essentially playing himself. This means no fake nose or false teeth to deploy as a disguise. It means no place to run and nowhere to hide. “Have you ever tried playing yourself?” Clooney – perhaps rhetorically – asked a Vanity Fair journalist last month. “It’s hard to do.”
