‘The Bondsman’ First Look: Kevin Bacon Goes Full Demon-Hunter

Kevin Bacon believes there has always been a rough-justice aspect to horror films. As the Scream movies pointed out, those who fall victim to the mad slasher or bloodthirsty monster usually make some kind of misstep that puts them in harm’s way. It doesn’t mean they deserve the death penalty, but bad choices usually lead to a bad end. Bacon cites his own demise in one of his earliest films—speared through the throat in 1980’s original Friday the 13th.

“Those movies, certainly back in the ’70s and ’80s, were narrow-minded morality tales. So if you either had sex or did drugs, you were going to die. That was guaranteed,” he says. “And in my case, I had sex with a girl, and then she left and I lit up a joint, and that’s it. You know my time is over.”

In a way, Bacon is striking back against those judgmental evildoers in his new thriller series The Bondsman, playing a bounty hunter who gets a second chance at life by agreeing to track down demons who’ve escaped from the maw of Hell. If these sinister wraiths think they can just cut loose and then cut down a bunch of misbehaving human beings … well, not on his watch.

Produced by the horror specialists at Blumhouse Television, The Bondsman (which debuts on Amazon’s Prime Video on April 3rd) is essentially a gritty cop show with monsters. “It is very violent and has a lot of blood and scares, but it also has some tongue-in-cheek aspects,” Bacon says. “It’s oftentimes funny, and it also has a lot of heart.”

Lending that human touch are the ordinary people who surround his demon-hunting character, Hub Halloran, including his mother, Kitty (played by Beth Grant, best known as the “Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!” lady from Donnie Darko.) Hub’s sort of a momma’s boy, since he still lives with her on her farm and she runs the skip trace business that employs him before he becomes conscripted into supernatural service. And his musician ex-wife, Maryanne (played by The Righteous Gemstones actor and Sugarland singer Jennifer Nettles), is a constant reminder of what might have been before his poor judgment torpedoed their musical dreams together.

“Hub is a character that could have gone either way,” Bacon says. “When they were younger, they were super wild together and got in trouble. There was potential that they would go to jail or really go down the wrong path, but it didn’t pan out in that way, mostly because she was smart enough to go, ‘All right, I’m done with you.’ I think being a self-destructive person is very much part of Hub’s DNA.”

Something in his shady past is what places Hub in thrall to the management of Hell after he is brutally killed on the job while hunting for a human fugitive in the show’s opening scene. He gets to come back to life and possibly earn redemption, if he helps round up other wicked souls that have gotten loose. What exactly he once did wrong is one of The Bondsman’s long-term mysteries. “He’s completely in denial about how he could ever have ended up in Hell,” Bacon says. “He’s like, ‘There’s got to be some kind of mistake. There’s been a glitch in the system.’ But he knows.”

A good guy forced to work for the bad guys felt like a unique premise to Erik Oleson, The Bondsman’s writer, executive producer, and showrunner. He wrote nearly every episode after Blumhouse recruited him to refine the concept from series creator Grainger David, a newcomer to TV. Oleson’s producing credits include the DC series Arrow, the Amazon shows The Man in the High Castle and Carnival Row, and the third season of Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix.

“We’ve all seen countless demons in various forms of one or another. I had never seen a show where the devil was treated like he was a warden of a prison, and that escaped prisoners would have to be caught and brought back to prison,” Oleson says. “Normally, you think, ‘Oh, the devil sends demons to earth to wreak havoc and cause trouble.’ This was the flip of it.”

Beelzebub, as it turns out, is also something of a bureaucrat. He doesn’t appear directly to give Hub his assignments, delegating that duty to Midge (played by Jolene Purdy, another Donnie Darko veteran). She is a supernatural being, but one who would seemingly fit in at the DMV. She is Hell’s regional manager in this part of Appalachia, working for a corporation called Pot of Gold, which Oleson describes as “the front company for the devil on earth.” “We decided we didn’t want to ever see the devil,” he adds. “It was much more fun to have him communicate through a 1980s fax machine and other anachronistic means.”

Oleson also layered in some autobiographical elements—the horse-farm parts, not the demon-hunting parts. “Most shows depict people who grew up on a farm in Virginia as bucktooth and living in a trailer, not with love and appreciation,” he says. “I very much wanted to tell a story that treated the Appalachia of it with respect and love as opposed to looking down the nose at folks who aren’t living in New York or LA.”

The Bondsman is based around what you might consider Oleson’s hometown, if it had been a town—the countryside outside of Manassas in southern Fairfax County, Virginia. When Bacon’s character is grinding down an old tree as part of his home upkeep, that’s straight from the showrunner’s own experience. “My dad was a government worker, and so I grew up with horses and zero friends, unless my mom or my grandmother would drive me 45 minutes to a friend to play when I was a kid,” he says. “I was fencing chutes between the barn and the grazing fields and cutting up trees. That stump-grinder thing is straight out of my childhood. There’s quite a lot of my childhood in the set dressing.”

Bacon’s own history was also woven into the main character. We mentioned that this demon-catching crime series has a musical element, right? Hub Halloran’s performing past gave him the chance to contribute some songs to The Bondsman. For nearly 30 years, the actor has been playing in a duo with his sibling Michael as the Bacon Brothers.

“It really wasn’t my idea. In fact, in the past, I’ve kind of avoided the idea because when people know that I play, they might think that that’s a calling card for me for acting projects. It really isn’t because I try to keep them as separate as possible,” Bacon says. “What happened in the case of The Bondsman was that when the role of Maryanne was being cast, Jennifer was the best person to play the part and also just this incredible singer and songwriter.” The two of them ended up writing several songs for the show.

“It was important because he’s a guy that has sort of given up on his dreams. So what would be the dream that he gave up on that connected him to his family and to his ex-wife? And so it just was a natural fit that we would’ve had a band,” Bacon says. “He lets the whole music thing just go by the wayside and walks away from it. He hasn’t picked up a guitar in years and it ruined his marriage.”

When he gets a second chance at life, by way of this work-for-hire pact with the devil, Hub sees an opportunity to set some other things right as well. If he survives.

Just because he was resurrected once doesn’t mean it will happen again. The demons he pursues tend to take the form of the most salt-of-the-earth-type figures you can imagine, among them a local preacher and the captain of the cheerleading squad. Hub repeatedly finds himself in fights he isn’t equipped to win, which posed a challenge for the 66-year-old actor.

“Kevin is not a spring chicken, but he can actually beat the shit out of me or anybody half his age. The guy is a machine,” Oleson says. “I wasn’t sure, when we started, how physical Kevin would want to be. I pitched him this crazy idea of a demon fight underwater in a swimming pool, and he was just like, ‘Oh hell yes.’ I assumed as we would get closer, it would be a stunt guy doing that stuff. Uh-uh—that’s Kevin Bacon in the pool, holding his breath, doing stunts underwater.”

Bacon feels the toughest parts in the series are sometimes when he is not engaged in demonic combat. “I like it when it’s life or death. Just on a purely technical basis, if you look at a horror movie, there’s a very short percentage where you’re actually happy or smiling,” he says. “For an hour and 15 minutes of performance, you have to find different levels of terror, anxiety, sadness, anger, rage. So for an actor, it’s a very challenging thing to try to make that interesting and not have people go, ‘God, he just did that. He just made that face 10 minutes ago.’”