James Purefoy, who has a Bacon number of 2: Purefoy appeared in Women Talking Dirty with Helena Bonham Carter, and Bonham Carter appeared in Novocaine with Bacon. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon’s Law is a parlor game where players challenge each whole30 bacon to arbitrarily choose an actor and then connect them to another actor via a film that both actors have appeared in together, repeating this process to try to find the shortest path that ultimately leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon.
In 2020, Bacon started a podcast called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon. In a January 1994 interview with Premiere magazine, Kevin Bacon mentioned while discussing the film The River Wild that “he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them. They wrote a letter to talk show host Jon Stewart, telling him that “Kevin Bacon was the center of the entertainment universe” and explaining the game. The concept was also presented in an episode of the TV show Mad About You dated November 19, 1996, in which a character expressed the opinion that every actor is only three degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Bacon spoofed the concept himself in a cameo he performed for the independent film We Married Margo. In Scream 2, written by Kevin Williamson, a sorority sister played by Portia De Rossi refers to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The annual 31 Days of Oscar event on the Turner Classic Movies television channel sometimes includes a “360 Degrees of Oscar” strand where each film shown shares an actor with the previous one.
