THE BONDSMAN

Section: Kevin Bacon showed up for a featured talk career retrospective here at SXSW

Showrunner/EP: Erik Oleson

Logline: Murdered bounty hunter Hub Halloran (Kevin Bacon) is resurrected by the Devil to trap and send back demons that have escaped from the prison of Hell. By chasing down those demons with the help and hinderance of his estranged family, Hub learns how his own sins got his soul condemned -- which pushes him to seek a second chance at life, love, and country music.

Panelists: Oleson and star/EP Kevin Bacon.

Key Quote: Says Bacon about how he's come to perfect gritty roles like The Bondsman, "I started off Off Broadway, and I was a character actor. I was doing small parts -- they were prisoners and junkies, I was a teenager but those were the parts that I was doing. In Footloose, I was a pop star; that was not who I was essentially. I was kind of spinning my wheels. I credit Oliver (Stone) and our shared agent because she said 'Go talk to him about this movie JFK. He sat down with me, and said 'Will you be transformational?'

I don't think of giant milestones in a career, it's about chipping away over the years and sort of hanging in there...but when that one came out, things shifted 100 percent, they pretty much shifted overnight. Everyone was like 'Oh, he's not a leading man, he's a character actor' so, that's what I still am."

Bacon played the role of Willie O'Keefe in JFK, a seedy key witness in Jim Garrison's JFK assassination case. The character was a composite of four other witnesses whose testimony linked Clay Shaw to Lee Harvey Oswald and David Ferrie in the JFK murder plot.