'Sometimes you gotta do the sick stuff'

As we all know, the Oscars race has more to do with popularity than talent. Otherwise, Kevin Bacon would be up for Best Actor next week for his haunting portrayal of a convicted child molester trying to rebuild his life in

As it was, Bacon took the role for nothing. But then he's never been the most career-driven of actors. It's been 20 years since he kicked off his Sunday shoes in Footloose, arguably his one opportunity to become a star. Since then, his finest hours have come in support: the gay hustler in JFK, the quiet astronaut in Apollo 13,

the brutal prison guard in Sleepers, the divorced cop in Mystic River. But adapted from Steven Fechter's play by first-time writer-director Nicole Kassell, The Woodsman puts him centre stage.

'My own personal image has never been something that's important to me,' he explains. 'In Sleepers, I was asking a 12-year-old boy for a blow-job. If I were really concerned about image, I wouldn't do that.' Admitting playing Walter was 'hard to shake at night', Bacon --while reading case studies and psychological profiles - shied away from meeting a real-life paedophile. 'I don't think that there's anything that physically, from the character standpoint, identifies the sex offender,' he says. 'They don't drool, they don't have crazy eyes or horns.'

It's this empathy that makes Bacon's multifaceted performance so engaging. Not unlike Dylan Baker's portrait of a paedophile in Happiness, it shows us the man behind the tabloid frenzy. But did he not think playing a child abuser would harm his career? He shakes his head, gazing at me with penetrating blue eyes. 'I can't think that way. I'm an actor. I'm not a personality. I'm not a celebrity. I don't have a public persona that I'm trying to keep clean. F*** that. That's over. That's been over a long time ago. I'll play anything.'

Apart from, that is, Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon - the actor-linking game that became more famous than the star that inspired it. 'I'm terrible at it because I'm not that big of a movie fan,' he grunts. Bacon has come to terms with his place in the Hollywood pecking order: removed from the poster of Mystic River while co-stars Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars, he also lost the plum role of In The Cut's detective to a younger man, but humbly took an unbilled cameo.

Yet you get the impression that Bacon, despite his passion for risk-taking, is as vain as the next star. His grey hairs are well and truly hidden by a fetching auburn dye and there's not an ounce of fat on him. Wearing blue jeans,

a black shirt and a leather coat, he looks a decade younger than his 46 years. 'I have a gigantic ego,' he admits. 'I'm an actor - I'm 100 per cent ego.'

With The Woodsman bankrolled by the hip-hop impresario and former Posh Spice producer Damon Dash, Bacon signed on as producer and suggested his wife of 16 years, Kyra Sedgwick, play Vickie, Walter's girlfriend. Since meeting on the set of 1988 TV movie Lemon Sky, the pair - who live with their two children in New York - have kept their celebrity profile to a minimum. Sedgwick was particularly 'worried', says Bacon, about playing a couple on screen. 'I tried to convince her that it's not like we're doing some big romantic comedy, trading on some life that we have together. About a week before we started shooting, there was an article in The New York Times about why couples don't work on film. She was like "I'm outta here!" And we had to talk her back into it.'

They have worked twice together since. In Cavedweller, Bacon - who in real-life is one-half of folk-rock-soul-country band the Bacon Brothers, with sibling Michael - plays a rockstar opposite Sedgwick. Then there's Loverboy, his second film as director (after 1996's Losing Chase, which also starred Sedgwick), which is produced by their company, Mixed Breed Films. In it, Sedgwick plays a mother unable to let go of her son, with Bacon as her father and the

couple's 12-year-old daughter, Sosie Ruth, playing Sedgwick's character's younger self.

A devoted parent, Bacon says he has 'a two-week rule', meaning he will never go longer than a fortnight without seeing Sosie or her older brother,