Kevin Bacon, Ponzi Scheme Victim, Talks Moving Forward

As we reported back in 2008, actor Kevin Bacon and his actress-wife Kyra Sedgwick were the victims of Bernie Madoff’s massive $50 billion Ponzi scheme that, according to rumor, left them with “very little”. According to a recent interview, however, it seems that Kevin Bacon and his family are recovering from the ordeal quite nicely.

“I’m not going to say it didn’t have its emotional downsides,” Bacon told Details magazine regarding the scheme. “”But we’re both young, and we both had the ability to work and roll up our sleeves and start putting the pieces back together. The truth is that we went through it together.”

The couple never made it public just how much of their money was lost in the scheme, but he did reveal to Howard Stern on his Sirius XM show recently that a “lot of money” was lost — precisely how much he didn’t say.

“It’s fine,” he told Stern. “So you have a moment where you go, ‘Holy (expletive), that was many, many years of work just went away in a poof of smoke.’ And then you go, ‘Hang on, we’re okay. We’re looking at each other, we got a nice apartment, our kids are healthy. There’s other people who had it a lot worse. We can both work.’”

In a twist of irony, Bacon has already requested to play himself in the future Biopic that is due for production with Robert DeNiro signed up to play Madoff.  DeNiro and Bacon first appeared together in the film Sleepers and Kevin told The Sun:

“How great would it be if I could play myself and make an appearance and get a chance to work with Bob again?”

Meanwhile Bacon is moving forward with his latest role  in the upcoming ­X-Men: First Class, a film based on Marvel’s X-Men universe set in the 1960s. Kevin Bacon plays the role of villain Sebastian Shaw in the movie. When asked if he chooses to be cast into the role of the bad guy each time this is what he said.

I never go, “Oh, I want to do it because he’s the bad guy.” I can’t stand badly written bad guys or guys who are just miserable pricks. The character in Super is just such a sociopath, I found it amusing. And Jean-Claude Van Damme had been offered the part. To pick up Jean-Claude Van Damme’s rejects was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

Madoff, now 73, has been serving his 150-year prison sentence for the scheme since 2009.