Kevin Bacon: Working on hourlong drama 'The Following' is 'exhilarating'

NEW YORK, March 3 (UPI) -- Actor Kevin Bacon says he is happy starring in The Following because the small-screen, cult-themed thriller challenges him to really explore his character, FBI Agent Ryan Hardy, while also affording him enough time off in between seasons to make movies.

"I like it a lot. ... I still love doing movies," the 56-year-old Philadelphia native told reporters at a recent roundtable interview at New York Comic Con.

"We wrapped the season last year and I did three movies during the course of our hiatus and I never want to stop doing that because it gives me opportunities to play a whole different kind of character. That's always been my idea about what being an actor was. I'll play this guy. He's from this walk of life, wears these kinds of clothes, talks like this, walks like this. And then I can play a guy who is totally different," he explained. "What's cool about the series is that you get to inhabit somebody for such a long time that you really get to go deeper and deeper and deeper and just kind of discover more and more things about him. The second piece of it is that we shoot 14 hours almost on a regular basis and during that time I am acting, acting, acting. ... I rarely even set foot in my dressing room. That's exhilarating to me because I love to act. I love the time between action and cut and that's what I get."

Asked if he and his wife, Kyra Sedgwick -- the former star of the police procedural The Closer -- have swapped crime stories, given the themes of their shows, Bacon replied: "She's given me a lot of tips about being on an hour drama, I can tell you that, because she did it for seven years before I even started, so that was really helpful. Crime not so much." The Following airs Monday nights on FOX.