Kevin Bacon Says EPing ABC’s ‘Lucky 13’ Game Show Came From Being Open to ‘Outside of the Box’ Ideas

Kevin Bacon hadn’t considered entering into the world of competition reality television, but when ABC called him up about the possibility of executive producing a new game show, he was all ears.

“All throughout my life, there’s always been moments where an idea seems like a little bit outside of the box, depending on what I had been involved in,” Bacon told TheWrap. “But over the years, I’ve learned to leave myself open to all kinds of crazy notions.”

Despite having no background in the genre, Bacon was intrigued by one of the three ideas brought forward by the creators of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” Bacon said that he watched that series and even once competed on the celebrity edition, but admitted that he “didn’t do very well.”

After setting up a call where Bacon played the “Lucky 13” game himself, he was sold.

Cohosted by fellow actor Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin,” “Not Dead Yet”) and basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, “Lucky 13” challenges contestants to answer 13 true-or-false trivia questions, then asks them to predict how successfully they’ve answered the questions. Those who guess most accurately have the possibility of taking home a $1 million cash prize.

“Some games are really about having a great, vast knowledge of all different kinds of subjects. Some games are really just about chance — they’re just kind of fun and you don’t really need to know anything about anything to play them,” Bacon said. “But ‘Lucky 13,’ to me, has an interesting twist, which is that you’re not only showing what you know, but you’re showing how much you think you know.”

Bacon finds the game speaks to the human condition, which sometimes sees people answer a question “with a tremendous amount of confidence about your own knowledge,” whether or not they’re actually correct. In fact, Bacon was surprised no one had thought of the game yet, recalling that he thought to himself while being pitched and playing it, “How has nobody ever done this?”

While Bacon hasn’t been involved in a game show before, he has been the subject of the parlor competition game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where people trace the connections between a selected actor until they reach Bacon himself. First created in 1994 — a decade after Bacon starred in “Footloose” — the game was something Bacon assumed would go away “pretty quickly,” but it ended up hanging around.

“When that came around, I thought to myself, ‘What is this?’ I’m trying to be a serious actor over here, and here comes a game,” Bacon said. “There’s something about it that, so to speak, connects with people, and I’ve taken ‘Six Degrees’ and started a … charity organization, SixDegrees.org . I’ve embraced it. I’m certainly not embarrassed by it. I’ve done a lot of movies, and a lot of those movies have had a lot of people in them.”

Bacon also felt at home as a reality newcomer alongside cohosts Rodriguez and O’Neal, whose backgrounds outside of the game show world “lends a certain charm” to the show, he said.

“They’re so great together. They are naturally just funny, and they’re both so supportive of the people that are the contestants on the show,” Bacon said. “Certainly the contestants, the questions, the drama — all those things are entertaining, but I think just seeing Shaq and Gina together, that’s entertaining in and of itself.”

Bacon will also be making a special on-air appearance on Thursday’s episode of “Lucky 13,” which he said was in the works from the time he began discussing the series with ABC.

“I think people are really going to get a kick out of it,” he said. “The contestant that coincidentally ended up being the contestant during the segment that I came in was … so great. He’s just really funny, really cool guy. And even without me, I think it’s going to be a great episode.”

“Lucky 13” premieres Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.

The post Kevin Bacon Says EPing ABC’s ‘Lucky 13’ Game Show Came From Being Open to ‘Outside of the Box’ Ideas appeared first on TheWrap .