This past weekend, veteran actor Kevin Bacon returned to Payson High School — the small-town Utah campus where he filmed Footloose‘s iconic, Kenny Loggins-soundtracked final scene 40 years ago — responding to students’ #BaconToPayson social media campaign to convince him to attend their real-life senior prom.

But in an alternate universe, Payson’s Class of 2024 could have been tweeting #CassidyToPayson instead. And it might have been a maroon-tuxedo’d Shaun Cassidy, not Bacon, shouting, “Let’s daaaance!” in that school gymnasium back in 1984… if Cassidy’s self-described “really embarrassing audition” for the hit musical movie had gone more smoothly.

Cassidy, a much-adored teen idol who charted pop smashes like “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “Hey Deanie” in the late ’70s, quit music in 1980 — after releasing the risky glam/new wave album Wasp, produced by Todd Rundgren — to focus on acting. He eventually pivoted to a hugely successful behind-the-scenes career in television, but before that, he found success in front of the camera in projects like The Hardy Boys, Like Normal People, Breaking Away, and General Hospital, and even more so in multiple Broadway and West End stage productions, including Blood Brothers co-starring his older half-brother and fellow ’70s heartthrob, David.

But the film world seemed closed off to Shaun… until he got a call, about playing a certain footloose-and-fancy-free big-city rebel, that seemed like it might be his big-screen break.

“I had a lot of crazy auditions. I auditioned for a zillion things,” Cassidy chucklingly told me in 2022, when he was promoting his first concert tour in four decades, The Magic of a Midnight Sky, during a SiriusXM interview. “I mean, amazing auditions, great movies, but I didn’t get those parts. Maybe it was because I wasn’t that good an actor, but it may also have been the fact that people could not see past the ‘poster,’ you know? … I carried all that pop stuff around with me wherever I went. So, they weren’t going put me in Silence of the Lambs — which I auditioned for, by the way! Yes, for the part of the serial killer. For Buffalo Bill.”

Perhaps Buffalo Bill was casting too against type, but the skinny-tied, fleet-footed Ren McCormack, at least on paper, seemed like a good fit for a charismatic blond pop phenom like Cassidy. “I auditioned for Footloose,” he confessed. “Kevin Bacon had been on Broadway in a play called Slab Boys, which I also auditioned for and did not get, but Kevin was not known yet, really. My agent called me and said, ‘There’s this musical [film], and it’s a really good script. I think you’d be really right for the part.’ I said, ‘Well, Footloose — is that like a dancing show?’ I mean, I kind of move well, but I am not remotely a dancer. Not at all a dancer. But he said, ‘Oh, yeah, but you just have to move a bit.’”

However, it turned out that the Footloose choreography was a bit more advanced than the step-touch, step-touch that Cassidy had expected. “Oh, they send me off to this audition, and the audition is literally like a Broadway, Bob Fosse danceline: ‘Everybody, 1, 2, 3, 4!’ and ‘We’re gonna do this move’ and that move and this move. And some friends of mine who I happened to have been having lunch with came and were outside, looking in the door of the dancehall, watching. And it was literally the worst audition. So embarrassing. And they were laughing their asses off.”

Everything obviously worked out in the end. Bacon’s Footloose breakout led to so many other movie roles that he eventually inspired his own “Six Degrees” trivia game, while Cassidy went on to create, produce, and write hit television series like Roar, Invasion, and New Amsterdam. Cassidy’s first TV pilot, CBS’s American Gothic in 1995, wasn’t quite as terrifying as Silence of the Lambs, but “it was a very, very dark show with a very dark lead… so it got a lot of attention, and a lot of that attention was [because] people couldn’t put their heads around the fact that Shaun Cassidy had written this terribly dark thing!” Cassidy laughed. “The great thing about writing is that ultimately the script has to stand on its own merit. It doesn’t matter who wrote it.”

And so, Cassidy has zero regrets about not dancing down a more expected pop career path. “You know, there was some part of me that just wasn’t even comfortable being that [celebrity/performer type of] person. I didn’t want to be that center of attention. I wanted to produce the movie, or write the movie,” he explained. “My brain is more like a writer. I think, in a way, a lot of performers can’t see themselves, but I always felt like I was watching myself, like, ‘Oh, I’ll just do this and see what happens.’

“And I had famous people in my house from the time I was little [Shaun's parents are Shirley Jones, who just celebrated her 90th birthday, and the late Jack Cassidy]. … And all of that was like school for me on not only how to manage a career in the business, but how to prioritize life over career, and use your career to make your life better,” Shaun continued. “I would watch how the business would affect their lives, the hills and valleys of it all, the uncertainty of it all. I don’t care if you’re the most successful actor in the world, you are still at the mercy of people wanting to hire you. And I did not like that as an actor. … I was really fortunate that I kind of saw that fairly early and got to step back. And yes, my early success afforded me that. I basically stayed home for my twenties and read books and did little plays, and then came out again in the ’90s.

“But anyway,” Cassidy added with a laugh, “God bless Kevin Bacon.”

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