Kevin Bacon And Jennifer Nettles Discuss Horror-Comedy Show ‘The Bondsman’

If you want to see Kevin Bacon as a badass bondsman/ex-country music singer who just got back from hell (literally) and now has to fight demons on earth whilst trying to win his family back, Prime Video’s newest series The Bondsman might be just what you’re looking for.

After a failed marriage, a disappointing career in country music and a rocky relationship with his teenage son, Hub finds himself living in his mother’s garage. Now, Hub’s only chance to get a second chance at life is to honor the deal he made with Satan: He has to kill the many demons that are currently walking the earth. If he fails at his task, it will be his one-way ticket back to hell.

At first, the audience is inclined to believe Hub when he says that he doesn’t know why he ended up in hell after being killed. Could he be in denial? We soon find out that Hub knows very well why he got there in the first place, and that it wasn’t a mistake at all.

It’s no spoiler to say that within the first five minutes of the first episode, Hub gets killed, because that’s where the story starts. But it’s also within these first minutes that we get a glance at Hub’s wild and tough personality, when he forces a man out of his shelter by using a hornet nest.

During my interview with the Bacon, the actor said, “What we really needed at the top of our pilot was to see Hub doing his work. It’s not a great job and he doesn’t really like his job, he would rather be playing music than anything else. But this is what he’s doing for a living. He comes up with this genius idea of using a hornet nest and blowing some smoke on it, which is actually a real thing, and he tosses it into this crappy motel room. It’s a fun sequence, we had a fun time shooting that.”

While Hub can certainly fight, Bacon was particularly drawn to this story because of the duality of Hub’s personality. He said, “I was really drawn to a character that had a lot of regrets, a lot of guilt, obviously, and denial about what he’s done in the past, which becomes part of the story.”

He added: “I also like that he’s like this man, who can fight, but he’s also very child like, in a lot of ways. He really is still too connected to his mother in my opinion, living basically in her garage. He couldn’t make the big decisions in life, his marriage, his son, and keeping the band together you know. He still has a little bit of a Peter Pan thing going on.”

Making Hub a relatable character, struggling in his personal life and without any superpower whatsoever was very important for Bacon. He said, “That was something we talked about a lot, I didn’t want him to have any kind of superpowers and I wanted to play into just the fact that, a guy my age, everything hurts, you know. Like jumping into a pool, fighting a cheerleader underwater, you know, it’s gonna be hard and it’s gonna hurt.”

Country star and three-time Grammy winner Jennifer Nettles portrays Maryanne, a very talented country music singer and Hub’s ex-wife. During our interview, Nettles said that the idea of a family getting together to fight demons while exorcising their own demons (no pun intended) was a very important part of the story. Nettles said, “I appreciate that, it’s like ‘We do this together, if we go down, we go down together!’”

She added: “Demons are kind of the vehicle for the rest of the story, I mean don’t get me wrong, there’s the fun of the gore and the camp of it, but it really is about all these people, interacting in their relationships, while in the context of this otherworldly threat that is on them. I definitely think there’s a lot of heart to this story.”

Bacon’s love for the horror genre and music needs no introduction. But when the actor got the opportunity to blend and explore these two elements in a TV show, he wasn’t sure if it was going to work at first. He said, “The idea that we were going to fit demons, family and country music into a half hour episode, I was a bit like, ‘Wow, is this really going to work?’ But when you don’t have the commercial breaks, you really can cram a lot into a half hour.”

The episodes of The Bondsman last between 20 and 30 minutes, which makes for great rhythm and a well-paced story, especially when each episode picks up right after the previous one.

Bacon said, “You raised a really good point, and it is that we really had a discussion because it started out as just a pilot, you know, that’s really all we had and the ideas about how it would shape over the course of the season. But then it takes place over only a few days, it’s a whirlwind trip, you have some flashbacks obviously, but rhythm is a good way of putting it.”

Regarding his music, Bacon makes it a point to never push this passion into any TV show or movie he might be doing. He said, “I never try to shoot any kind of music into my projects. If it makes sense for the story, I guess, but I don’t wanna force that. In this case, the music was already there, the creator of the pilot, Grainger David, was a big fan of country music. Then there was some discussion about where these songs would fit, and who was going to write these songs, we didn’t want to just do covers. We wanted original songs that Hub and Maryanne had written together. I said ‘I’m willing to take a shot at it, if anybody else is down’. Then Jennifer Nettles was cast and she’s a great singer, writer, fantastic actress, so we got together right away and started writing songs. The songs that you hear, we wrote them.”

He added: “What was fun about it is that, it’s not too often that as a songwriter, I get to sing from a character’s point of view, because I’m usually writing from my point of view. But to have to go back and think about who Hub was 15 or 20 years ago, what kind of songs he would have written with Maryanne, from their point of view, that was a really fascinating exercise.”

When talking with Nettles about having to write songs from a character’s point of view, she said, “It was very interesting but not new, in the sense that for me, as a writer in general, regardless if it’s from my own original material or if I’ve been writing a musical for a long time, I approach it from the place of a storyteller. I create stories, I create characters in this, not all of my songs are biogrophical and confessional, right? But of course the emotional landscape of any artist is their own, the story itself isn’t necessarily my own.”

She added: “But what was new was really getting to explore this character in this very specific world for a TV show. It was super enriching and it really sets this show apart from anything else that’s out there on TV right now. Because you have this music that is so organically a part of the characters and of this world, as a storyteller I think it allowed us to get that much more deep into the characters. Because we got to explore them through the music too. You get a portal into their backstory, through the music.”

Hub and Maryanne’s relationship to music is also one of the many reasons they grew apart. But when Maryanne asserts herself and tells Hub that she loves writing and singing her own songs, and that no one can make her feel bad about it anymore, it feels like a very empowering moment for her character. I asked Nettles how this simple, but very important sentence translated into her everyday life, as an artist.

She said, “I love this question! It’s a very interesting question, because regardless of our lines of work or hobbies, everyone has some level of creativity within themselves and different areas of enjoyment. Some of us feel most connected to that source. For me it’s through writing and music, but for others it’s through sports or physicality or whatever. But regardless, you don’t have to be perfect at something, or the best at something or to do something professionally to be able to claim it and claim ownership of the joy that it brings you and that makes it valid. The claiming of it as your own is what validates it.”

She added: “They have, as you very well said, their very own demons to exorcise, their own challenges that’s sort of a shadow on their relationship throughout the whole season. So for her to be in that space of mind and claim that, it shows a real evolution in their romantic relationship as well.”