Some Hollywood marriages come with an asterisk. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s does not.
They have been married since September 4, 1988. Do the math and that lands at 37 years, which in show-business terms is roughly seven lifetimes.
Bacon is 68 now. Sedgwick is 60. They have been a couple longer than plenty of their fans have been alive, and they have done it in the one town most likely to pull two actors apart.
Ask either of them for the secret and you get a joke first, always.
“Whatever you do, don’t listen to celebrities on advice on how to stay married,” is the line they keep returning to, usually with a straight face, usually together.
It’s funny because it’s a little bit true. And it’s their way of dodging the question they’ve been asked a thousand times without pretending they’ve cracked some code the rest of us haven’t.
The beginning is its own small story. They first met late in the 1970s, when Sedgwick was still a teenager and Bacon was a young actor on the rise. Nothing happened then. It was years later, on the 1987 set of a drama called “Lemon Sky,” that the two of them actually clicked.
He was the more famous one. She was the newcomer. Neither of those facts seemed to matter much once they got going, and by September of 1988 they were married.
Sedgwick has never been shy about her half of the arrangement. Over the years she’s talked about the ordinary work of it, the arguing and the making up, the way two strong personalities have to keep choosing each other on the boring Tuesdays and not just the anniversaries.
They raised two children along the way, Travis and Sosie, both grown now, both drawn to creative lives of their own. The family stayed close, and mercifully, out of the tabloid churn that swallowed so many of their peers.
Which brings us back to that anniversary video, and the thing nobody guessed.
When people ask the famous couple how they keep a marriage exciting after all this time, you might expect something grand. A second honeymoon. A shared passion project. A philosophy.
The real answer is a backyard game.
“People ask how we keep things exciting,” Bacon said in the clip he posted to mark 37 years. “Gotta be open to trying new things.”
The new thing, it turns out, is cornhole. The lawn game. Two boards, a handful of beanbags, the same one you’ve played at a summer barbecue. The Bacon-Sedgwick household has apparently gotten seriously into it, kids included, and it’s become a regular backyard fixture.
There is something almost stubbornly ordinary about that, and that’s exactly why it works. Thirty-seven years in, the couple that could afford any grand gesture in the world keeps the fire going by tossing beanbags across the grass and talking a little trash.
No code. No secret. Just two people who met on a movie set almost forty years ago, refused to become a statistic, and still find each other good company on a Saturday afternoon.
And whatever you do, they’d remind you, don’t take their word for it.
