The Best-Connected Actor
I like good data journalism, and The Pudding has once again delivered a fine – and slightly nerdy – piece of it: they set out to find the best-connected actor in Hollywood.
Their starting point is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, a game based on the concept of six degrees of separation, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or fewer acquaintance links apart.
In the game, players pick an actor and connect them to another actor via a film both appeared in. This is repeated to find the shortest path to the prolific American actor Kevin Bacon.
Why Kevin Bacon? Because he once said in an interview that he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who'd worked with them. (The Wikipedia article has the whole story.)
Bacon has indeed worked with a great many actors. But is he the best-connected one? No, he is not the center of Hollywood, as The Pudding found out. They analyzed a dataset of 169,000 actors and their connections and presented the results in many entertaining ways. In their "remoteness rank," Bacon only comes in 175th. They even tried to predict who will be the best-connected actor in the future.
I won't spoil who the real center of Hollywood is. See for yourself.