(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 14 October 2025 0:30, UK
Even though he’s never really been regarded as an A-lister despite his decades of success, Kevin Bacon is still a big enough name that it’s remarkable how the actor has made it through his entire career without ever reprising a single role.
He’s been involved in sequels, though, just not two films where he’s played the same character. He lent support as a supervillain in X-Men: First Class, appeared in the third instalment in Ti West’s X trilogy, hounded Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, and played himself in James Gunn’s The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
Few people, unless they’ve got a very soft spot for straight-to-video shite, would even realise that Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man or Robert Schwentke’s RIPD got follow-ups, but they both had less Bacon than a vegan diet. It’s an admirable approach to his filmography, and it makes him one of the very few stars in Hollywood who’ve managed to avoid returning to the well.
That said, he did it once, and it didn’t go so well. The only time the man everyone in the business can be connected to in sex degrees or less went against the grain and reprised a role for the first time, only for the end result to be mothballed and never released, with the only proof of its existence coming from footage that was screened to a captive audience years after the fact.
As much as he hated it at the time, confessing he only took the role because his “career was in the toilet,” Bacon has grown fonder of Tremors with the passage of time. The cult classic creature feature spawned five sequels, a prequel, and a short-lived TV series that was canned after a single season, none of which had anything to do with the actor who played Val McKee in the 1990 original.
Almost three decades later, Bacon broke the habit of a lifetime when he signed on to play the monster-battling handyman in a television pilot in the hopes of securing a series order. Perhaps indicating that there was a reason why he’d never repeated himself, the direct continuation of the first Tremors wasn’t picked up, and it was never shown in full to anyone other than a smattering of TV executives.
“At first, I thought this was a terrible idea to do this as a series,” he admitted when snippets of the failed pilot were screened in 2019, two years after it was rejected. “And then I talked to Andrew [Miller, who wrote the pilot and was eying the showrunner’s position] and thought it was a great idea to do this for TV.”
He was swayed by the chance to revisit McKee, whom he called “pretty much the only character I’d ever played in a movie that I ever thought, ‘This would be a fun guy to check out 25 years later.’” That’s exactly what he did, and despite having a big name attached to a legacy sequel to a cult flick that’s remained popular for over 30 years, nobody showed any interest in the project.
The unaired Tremors pilot ignored all of the offshoots to pick up 25 years after Ron Underwood’s opener, with McKee viewed as a national hero for his graboid-slaying exploits. His 15 minutes of fame were short-lived, though, with the planned series finding him as a booze-soaked husk who’d driven his wife and daughter away, until another monster-sized threat presumably emerges. It’s Bacon’s only sequel, and it remains hidden under lock and key.
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