Kevin Bacon Says His Memories of Filming Friday the 13th Involve a 'Very Small Bathing Suit'

Kevin Bacon is remembering his big start in the biz: as one of Jason’s victims in Friday the 13th. 

"There was no way I was surviving,” the actor, 65, quipped on an episode of his Six Degrees with Kevin Bacon podcast in which he answered questions from fans. 

Among the memorable deaths in the 1980 Friday the 13th installment that would launch over a dozen sequels and countless other low-budget slashers, Bacon’s character Jack is stabbed in the throat with an arrow — through a mattress while he lies atop it. 

“I wasn't gonna stick around in that movie for very long,” Bacon said, considering the vices his teenage camp counselor character indulged in — “the combination of the speedo and the marijuana and the sex,” he joked. 

“There was such a trope in horror movies that continued forever, and that was that if you had sex or did drugs, you were definitely gonna die.”

Over 40 years later, the aforementioned speedo holds a special place in some fans’ memories. Answering a question about a scene where Jack dives headfirst into the camp’s lake, “when everyone else jumped in,” the Footloose star noted, “I'm not a diver by any stretch of the imagination.” 

Anyone revisiting Friday the 13th now “could see a very small bathing suit and a very bad dive,” said Bacon. “I remember a few years ago there was a meme of how bad my dive was… absolutely terrible.”

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In his defense, Bacon remembers he and his costars — including Adrienne King, Harry Crosby, Jeannine Taylor, Laurie Bartram and Mark Nelson — had only one chance to capture their group jump into the water. “I could have done better,” he said. “But I think the whole thing was that our hair was supposed to be dry, so we had to do it in one take.”

Plus, Friday the 13th filmed in New Jersey in the fall of 1979. “If you look at the lake that we’re jumping in, the leaves are changing,” Bacon pointed out. “So it was freezing. None of us wanted to get into the water... It was so cold, but we had to of course pretend that it was hot, and we were frolicking.”

As for the infamously skimpy speedo, which left little to the imagination, Bacon explained, “We always had tiny little bathing suits. That was just what bathing suits were!”

Reflecting on his long list of movie credits, which includes such genre hits as Tremors, Stir of Echoes and They/Them, Bacon added, “I love horror. It's been good to me.”

Among the actor-producer’s upcoming credits are Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F with Eddie Murphy and MaXXXine with Mia Goth.