Nearly a decade before buying his haunted Connecticut farmland, Kevin Bacon was living in a much smaller New York City apartment on an absolute shoestring budget.
The Footloose star, who moved to the Big Apple in 1976, revealed on the Kelly Clarkson Show that his very first place was a two-room apartment that he shared with a total stranger for “$150 a month.”
After couch surfing at his sister’s for four months, Bacon told host Kelly Clarkson that he found his own space after spotting “an ad on the back of the Village Voice, and it said ‘Artists, actors, musicians residence,’ and I thought, ‘Well, that sounds good.'”
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t exactly the bohemian heaven the listing proclaimed it to be. “It was basically a flophouse, really,” he said through laughter. “I guess there were some artists there, but not a lot.”
To make matters worse, the Philadelphia native said he went to apply at the rental office only to discover that there were no single room apartments available. With no other options, Bacon spontaneously agreed to become roommates with the man sitting next to him.
“He was like, ‘You want to live together?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, okay,'” he recalled. “We lived together for four years. In fact, I just had lunch with him the other day.”
Dia Dipasupil/Getty
Bacon said that his roommate was a classical pianist at the Copacabana and that “he’d come home and he’d be playing Chopin” during the afternoon, adding, “It was really cool.”
Clarkson revealed that she had a similar experience moving from Texas to Los Angeles with a “random person that I did not know,” although it didn’t last long because their apartment burned down.
“I slept in my car for a few days, and then tried out for a show called American Idol, so it all worked out,” she explained. “I feel like everyone in this industry has some crazy thing where you’ve either lived in your car, or on a mattress in someone’s house. You really got to want your dream.”
Bacon added, “You gotta have the hunger.”
Watch Clarkson and Bacon share apartment stories in the clip above.
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