Kevin Bacon worked with writer-director James Gunn in the 2010 low-budget, skewed superhero movie Super, but he tells ABC Audio he was just as surprised as other moviegoers to hear his name dropped in Gunn’s 2014 blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy. 

Bacon recalls to ABC Audio, “I went to the movies just like opening weekend, like I would, you know…I’d seen the trailer and I went to the movies having no idea that I was mentioned in it. But I mean, you can imagine you’re sitting there in the theater and I start looking around at people and going, you know, ‘Did I just hear what I think I heard?'”

For the uninitiated, Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill/Star-Lord was abducted from Earth when he was still a kid back in the ’80s, so he cites Footloose and the legend of a “great hero named Kevin Bacon” to Zoe Saldaña’s Gamora. In Avengers: Infinity War, Pom Klementieff’s Mantis suggests the actor might be one of the Avengers.

“It was a pretty out of body experience, honestly,” Bacon admits. “I called my wife afterwards,” he says of Kyra Sedgwick. “It’s like, ‘You got to see this movie..I’m going to go back with you, but I’m not going to tell you anything about it…'”

On Friday, Bacon officially joins the MCU as himself in Disney+’s Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.

Klementieff explains, “The story is just hilarious…Mantis and Drax (Dave Bautista) want to find a beautiful Christmas gift for…Peter Quill. And then they brainstorm, and they come up with the idea of Kevin Bacon, the real Kevin Bacon, the actual person.” 

In the spirit of Christmas, the aliens abduct him.

Disney is the parent company of ABC News.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.