Kevin Bacon is shocked to discover his wife is his cousin (Photo: Reproduction/Instagram)
Kevin Bacon, 65, was perplexed to discover that his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, 58, is his distant cousin.
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In 2013, the couple, married for 35 years, appeared on a TV show about ancestry called Finding Your Roots. On the show, host Henry Louis Gates Jr showed Sedgwick a photo of her ninth-degree cousin and announced, “And his name is Kevin Bacon.”
“See. I knew! I knew! I knew! I knew! I knew!” exclaimed Sedgwick, who had previously expressed concern that the show might reveal they were related. “As long as we’re not first cousins, it’s okay,” the actress added.
According to a report from The Independent, Bacon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA), but his father’s lineage traces back 12 generations to a Quaker (a member of the religious group Society of Friends) named Henry Comly, who lived in Bristol, England, in 1663.
Meanwhile, Sedgwick comes from one of the most prominent families in New England, including statesmen who played a vital role in liberating Massachusetts from British control and in the creation of the American Republic.
Recently, the actor expressed his dislike for the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which is based on the assumption that almost everyone in the film industry can be linked to Bacon through their roles in six steps or less.
“I was horrified! Because I thought it was really a joke at my expense. I just thought, ‘Oh, come on, they’re just making fun of me, let’s be honest!'” he said in a guest appearance on the On With Mario Lopez podcast.
“I heard about it; people would come up to me and say, ‘My cousin invented a game about you’ or ‘I’m so hungover, I was playing your game last night.’ I had no idea what they were talking about; I thought, ‘I think you got the wrong guy.'”
Bacon went on to say that he assumed by now the trend would have died, but the game is still widely played today. “It spread, it spread, and it spread, and I honestly thought it would fade away, but it just didn’t go away!” the actor recounted.
