Degrees of Kevin Bacon Calculator

What is a Bacon Number?

A Bacon number is a measure of how many film co-starring links separate any given actor from Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0. Any actor who appeared in the same film as Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of 1. Any actor who has not appeared with Bacon directly, but has appeared with someone who has, gets a number of 2. The pattern continues outward, always counting the shortest possible chain.

The concept applies the mathematical idea of graph distance to the film industry. Think of every actor as a node in a network, with an edge connecting any two actors who appeared in the same film. The Bacon number is the shortest path between any actor's node and Kevin Bacon's node. Because Kevin Bacon appeared in such a wide variety of films — from low-budget horror (Friday the 13th, 1980) to prestige drama (Mystic River, 2003) to blockbuster action (X-Men: First Class, 2011) — his node is connected to an unusually large and diverse cluster of other nodes, making him the almost-perfect centre of the Hollywood graph.

Famous Bacon Numbers — With Full Connection Chains

The examples below are verified connection chains showing the film link at each step. Where multiple paths exist, the shortest is shown.

Bacon Number 2 — A-list Hollywood

Bacon Number 1 — Direct co-stars

Kevin Bacon's direct co-stars span an unusually wide range of film types. A few of the most famous Bacon number 1 actors:

Six Degrees of Separation — The Theory Behind the Game

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. The concept originates from the work of Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who proposed in a 1929 short story that any two people could be connected through five intermediaries. The theory was later studied empirically by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in his famous 1967 "small world experiment," in which letters passed between strangers in Nebraska and Massachusetts arrived in an average of 5.5 steps — giving rise to the phrase "six degrees of separation."

Applied to actors and film, the network is much denser than the general human social graph. Films routinely bring 10–50 actors into direct professional contact, and a prolific character actor may have appeared in 100+ productions over a 40-year career. The result is a remarkably small average separation — closer to three degrees than six for any two working actors in the English-language film world.

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game was introduced on The Jon Stewart Show in 1994, when the three Albright College students presented their theory. Kevin Bacon initially expressed displeasure at the idea of being a hub of Hollywood separation, but later embraced it — founding the charitable social networking site SixDegrees.org (later renamed to Crowdrise) in 2007.

How to Play the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Game

The game can be played informally by two or more people with general film knowledge, or competitively with cards or an app:

The board game

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was published as a physical board game by Endless Games in 1997. Players draw cards with actor names and race to build the shortest chain to Kevin Bacon from their hand of cards, which list film co-stars. The game requires no internet connection — it tests players' raw film knowledge. It went through multiple print runs during the late 1990s and is now out of print, though copies are available on resale markets. Endless Games has published other pop-culture trivia games but has not reprinted the Kevin Bacon edition.

Digital apps

Several unofficial apps have implemented the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game on mobile platforms. The Oracle of Bacon (oracleofbacon.org) provides the most comprehensive and authoritative web-based tool. Various iOS and Android apps have appeared over the years, typically using IMDb data or the Oracle's API. As of the mid-2020s, there is no official Kevin Bacon-endorsed app, though Kevin Bacon has participated in various digital campaigns related to the concept.

The Oracle of Bacon — The Definitive Tool

The Oracle of Bacon (oracleofbacon.org) is a website created by Patrick Reynolds at the University of Virginia in 1996, and it remains the authoritative source for Kevin Bacon numbers. It uses a graph database built from the complete Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and applies breadth-first search to find the shortest path between any actor and Kevin Bacon.

The Oracle is also notable for computing the mathematical centre of the Hollywood universe: which actor has the lowest average separation number from every other actor? Kevin Bacon held this title for a period but has since been displaced. As of the most recent calculations, actors such as Harvey Keitel, Donald Sutherland, Robert De Niro, and Martin Sheen score slightly better — their films span an even broader range of decades and genres, making their network slightly more central. Kevin Bacon himself typically ranks in the top 1,000 out of all actors in the database.

The Oracle also allows you to calculate the separation between any two actors — not just with Kevin Bacon. This reveals that the concept works for virtually any prolific actor as the hub, not just Bacon. The game's founder selection of Kevin Bacon was inspired, but not uniquely optimal.

Seven Degrees — Beyond Kevin Bacon

The "Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon" is an extension of the game that challenges players to connect not just actors but any public figure to Kevin Bacon through some combination of film appearances and real-world associations. In this variant, a film co-star counts as one degree, but so does a professional collaboration, a shared public appearance, or a documented close relationship.

More interesting mathematically is asking: how many degrees separate actors with very high Bacon numbers? The Oracle of Bacon identifies actors with Bacon numbers of 8 or 9 — typically very obscure performers who appeared in only one film, made decades ago, in a film tradition with zero crossover to the Hollywood mainstream. These outliers demonstrate the outer edge of the connected component of the film world.

Beyond actors, the Six Degrees concept has been applied to scientists (the Erdős number, connecting mathematicians through co-authored papers), musicians (the Bacon-Orbison number), and social networks (the 2016 Facebook study found an average separation of 3.57 between any two users globally — well below six degrees).

Why Kevin Bacon? His Filmography Explained

Kevin Norwood Bacon was born on 8 July 1958 in Philadelphia. He studied at the Manning Street Actor's Theatre and later the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York before breaking through with a small role in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and his more visible appearance in Friday the 13th (1980). His breakout as Ren McCormack in Footloose (1984) made him a household name.

What makes Bacon an unusually central node in the Hollywood network is not just the volume of his films but their diversity. He has appeared in horror (Friday the 13th), teen drama (Footloose), military legal thriller (A Few Good Men), historical conspiracy drama (JFK), romantic comedy (She's Having a Baby), supernatural thriller (Stir of Echoes), superhero origin film (X-Men: First Class), and literary drama (Mystic River). Each genre cluster brings a different set of co-stars, and Bacon has linked them together across four decades.

Common Questions

• What is the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon theory?
  Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlour game and cultural phenomenon based on the concept of Six Degrees of Separation — the idea that any two people on Earth can be connected through a chain of no more than six social links. Applied to Hollywood, the game posits that Kevin Bacon can be connected to any actor in the film industry through six or fewer co-starring relationships. It was invented in 1994 by three Albright College students — Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli — after watching a TV marathon of Kevin Bacon films and noticing how many co-stars he had across different genres and eras.
• How do you calculate the Kevin Bacon number?
  A Kevin Bacon number (or Bacon number) is calculated by tracing the shortest possible chain of shared film appearances between an actor and Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon himself has a Bacon number of 0. Any actor who appeared in the same film as Kevin Bacon has a Bacon number of 1. Any actor who appeared with a Bacon-number-1 actor (but not directly with Kevin Bacon) has a Bacon number of 2, and so on. The number represents the minimum number of links required — if two shorter paths exist, the number is the length of the shorter one. The Oracle of Bacon website (oracleofbacon.org) uses graph theory and the full Internet Movie Database to compute Bacon numbers for every credited actor.
• What is Leonardo DiCaprio's Bacon number?
  Leonardo DiCaprio has a Bacon number of 2. He appeared with Robert De Niro in This Boy's Life (1993), and Robert De Niro appeared with Kevin Bacon in Sleepers (1996). This two-step chain is the shortest possible connection between DiCaprio and Bacon. Many of DiCaprio's most famous co-stars — Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie — also have Bacon numbers of 2, making his extended Hollywood network extremely well-connected.
• What is the average Bacon number across all Hollywood actors?
  According to the Oracle of Bacon, which maintains the definitive database, the average Bacon number for all actors in the Internet Movie Database is approximately 2.99. About 12% of actors have a Bacon number of 1, roughly 33% have a number of 2, and about 25% have a 3. Very few actors have a number above 6. This low average — essentially three degrees for any Hollywood actor — is what made Kevin Bacon an almost perfect centre for the game: he is one of the most connected actors in film history due to his work across a huge range of genres and budgets from the early 1980s onwards.
• Why is Kevin Bacon the centre of the game, and not another actor?
  Kevin Bacon was chosen somewhat randomly — the three college students who invented the game picked him because of a perceived ubiquity across films from the early 1980s onward. However, he turns out to be mathematically well-suited to the role: the Oracle of Bacon ranked him as the most connected actor in Hollywood for a period, though he has since been displaced by actors like Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, and Martin Sheen, who have slightly lower average separation numbers. What made Kevin Bacon ideal was his unusually wide range — horror (Friday the 13th), teen drama (Footloose), legal thriller (A Few Good Men), literary drama (Mystic River), and blockbusters — which created connections across otherwise disconnected clusters of the film world.
• What is the Oracle of Bacon?
  The Oracle of Bacon is a website created by Patrick Reynolds at the University of Virginia in 1996. It uses the complete Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to compute Kevin Bacon numbers for any actor through a breadth-first graph search. The site also computes the 'centre of the Hollywood universe' — the actor with the lowest average Bacon number when their number is calculated for every other actor. The Oracle became famous alongside the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game in the late 1990s and remains the authoritative source for Bacon numbers. Kevin Bacon himself has visited and endorsed the site.
• Is there a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon board game?
  Yes — Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon was published as a board game by Endless Games in 1997. Players draw cards showing actor names and race to build the shortest chain to Kevin Bacon using their knowledge of films and co-stars. The game was a commercial success during the late 1990s internet culture boom and went through multiple print runs. It is currently out of print but available on secondary markets. The game helped popularise the concept beyond internet culture and into mainstream awareness.
• How many degrees away are most people from Kevin Bacon?
  Most professional actors in the IMDb database are within 3 degrees of Kevin Bacon. About 87% of all actors in the database have a Bacon number of 3 or less. The game's central claim — six degrees or fewer — is far more conservative than the reality: in practice virtually every mainstream Hollywood actor is within 3 degrees. Non-actors who have appeared in films (politicians, musicians, athletes making cameos) and very obscure actors with only one or two credits may have higher numbers, and a handful of actors in completely isolated film traditions with no crossover connections to the Hollywood mainstream are genuinely unreachable.