Kevin Bacon, 60, Gets Real About Aging in the Spotlight: ‘I Feel Good!’ (Exclusive)

“When you turn 60, America weeps,” Kevin Bacon has joked of aging in the spotlight. It’s hard to believe it’s been 40 years since the eternally youthful actor first hit movie screens in National Lampoon’s Animal House, but Kevin said, “I don’t feel any different. The 9’s I don’t like. I had a hard time with 29, 39, 49, 59. The zeros I don’t really have an issue with.”

With his marriage to Kyra Sedgwick still going strong after 30 years, a great relationship with his two grown kids and a new role as an FBI agent on Showtime’s upcoming drama City on a Hill, Kevin, 60, has no reason to complain. “I feel good,” he exclusively told Closer Weekly at the recent TCA winter press tour in LA. “You get to a fork in the road at a certain time in your life, and one direction is bitterness and the other is gratitude. If you’ve chosen to walk down the path of gratitude, the things you’re grateful for and your passion for them hopefully increase.”

Kevin admitted he’s made some mistakes along the way, but he doesn’t regret anything. “I don’t have much of a rear-view mirror — I try to look down the road,” he said in a previous interview. “I wouldn’t change anything because all the times I’ve screwed up are part of the journey. If I take one piece out, I might not have ended up where I am.”

He does wish he had asked for more advice from mentors when he was a younger actor and cites Paul Newman (who played Kyra’s father in 1990’s Mr. & Mrs. Bridge) as a role model. “He had a combination of a deep well of talent and a perspective on the business,” Kevin has said. “He took the work seriously, but not the business. And all the work he did for charitable causes was huge.”

Kevin and Kyra, 53, have seen their son Travis, 29, and daughter Sosie, 26, follow in their footsteps with careers in music and acting, respectively. “Both my children are very independent people,” Kevin once admitted. “I love it because we communicate as adults.”

The youngest of six kids, Kevin had his entire family with him when he celebrated his 60th birthday last summer. “We went to see the David Bowie exhibit [at the Brooklyn Museum], then we all had dinner in the park,” Kevin said. “It was really cool.” And as for a dream role, he doesn’t have one: “I’ll know it when I see it.”

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