Kevin Bacon says he enrolled himself in high school at 24 to train for ‘Footloose’

Kevin Bacon went deep undercover to prepare for his role in “Footloose.”

During a recent episode of the “Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard” podcast, the actor revealed that to really understand the life of a teen in the 1980s as he prepared for his role in the 1984 musical drama, he posed as a high school student for one day.

“I was 24 and I was playing a 17-year-old,” Bacon said. “So … my ride-along was to enroll myself as an exchange student in the high school in Provo, Utah. ”

The high school’s principal was apparently in on the scheme, but none of the students or teachers knew Bacon’s true identity.

“They introduced me,” Bacon recalled, saying he told his supposed classmates that he was from Philadelphia, his real hometown, “in case they were going to ask questions.”

The rest of the day was “terrifying,” the actor said.

“My parents did not move around, so I really was an East Coast urban kid. I grew up right in the middle of Philadelphia. When I was 17, I moved right to the middle of Manhattan,” he said. “So to be a fish out of water in a small country, in this case, it was also a very heavily Mormon community.”

Bacon, 64, also shared that he wore a skinny tie for the day, thinking it would make him stand out as cool and edgy — a strategy that completely backfired.

“When I walked in, I had had this idea that a guy like me raised in an urban kind of situation comes to a country school. He’s going to walk down the hall like a badass, like don’t f--- with me,” he said.

“The second I walked in there, it was the complete opposite,” he continued. “I was like, ‘Holy f---, I gotta watch my a--. These guys are so much bigger than me. They right away don’t like me.”

Just like his “Footloose” character, a big city kid landing in a small-town school, Bacon said he stood out as “exotic.”

“My hair through much of those years was all based on whatever Sting happened to be doing,” he said.

Luckily, in a sweet moment that mirrored the plot of “Footloose,” Bacon said one student defended him from the bullies.

“It was so much like the movie because a guy came up to me who was a lot like the Chris Penn character, Willard, and kind of said, ‘Don’t worry about them, man, I got you,’ and he kind of befriended me,” he recalled.

Bacon reflected on the enduring popularity of “Footloose” in an interview with TODAY’s Willie Geist in July.

“I think that it was a great gift to be part of that movie,” he said. “I certainly took it very seriously when I was doing it and I love that people will still come up and say that they just showed it to their kids.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com