Good Node Hunting

You already know the game. Name an actor, any actor, and you can usually walk them to Kevin Bacon in a few short hops. Tom Hanks was in Apollo 13 with Bacon, so Hanks is one step away. Anyone who worked with Hanks is two. Play it long enough and it starts to feel like a magic trick: Hollywood is enormous, and yet almost everyone in it sits a few handshakes from the same guy. That is the fun of it, and it is also the claim. Kevin Bacon, center of the acting universe.

Here is the part the game quietly skips. It treats every credit as the same credit. A lead in a summer blockbuster and a face in the back of one crowd scene both move you exactly one step closer to Bacon. But those are not the same connection, and anyone who has sat through the credits knows it. So my co-author Joe DeMaio and I rebuilt the game with that difference put back in. We modeled Hollywood as a network of actors and films, then weighted every link by how prominent the roles actually were. The small-world shape held up. The center did not. Measured with weight, in the U.S. film network we built, Kevin Bacon is not the most connected actor in Hollywood. He is not close to first.

FIG 1 · PLACEHOLDERthe classic game board, Samuel L. Jackson to Kevin Bacon, with the thirteen distinct two-step routes fanning out through different intermediaries. White nodes are actors, black nodes are films.

Three guys and a couch

The game was not invented by mathematicians. It was invented in the early 1990s by three friends, Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, and Mike Ginelli, who noticed that Bacon seemed to turn up one connection away from everyone. They turned it into a party bit, and in March 1994 they took it to television. On The Jon Stewart Show they laid out the whole premise in one sentence: “We believe Kevin Bacon is the center of the whole acting universe.” You can still watch the clip. That appearance is where the game escaped the dorm room and became a thing your uncle knows about.

It caught on because it feels true. Most actors really are separated by only a few steps, the same way most people are separated by only a few acquaintances. That idea is older than Hollywood. A Hungarian writer named Frigyes Karinthy imagined it in a 1929 short story, and a psychologist named Stanley Milgram put numbers on it in the 1960s. The Bacon game is just the most fun anyone ever made it. But fun and true are not the same as complete, and the game left one big thing on the table.

The thing the game skips

Before grad school, I worked around movies. I shot stills on independent sets, took actors’ headshots, and designed posters. If you have ever laid out a movie poster, you know the billing block at the bottom is not decoration. The order of those names is negotiated, contract by contract, down to the size of the type. Position is prominence, written into law. Being billed first and being billed thirty-first are not the same job, and everyone in the room knows exactly which one they got.

I have been inside that negotiation. When I designed posters for independent films, the director would hand me the list of names, and the poster could only hold a few of them. At least once, an actor whose name did not make the cut messaged me directly and asked if I could add it. That was never my call to make, and I said so. And I remember one director who could not bring himself to cut the list at all. He wanted everyone on the poster. I told him everyone would not fit, he waffled, and in the end I chose the names myself. He never asked me to change a thing. I think he wanted someone else to be the one who decided. That is billing: A negotiation so loaded that people would rather outsource it than own it.

The game ignores all of that. Billing order is the one piece of information sitting right there in every cast list, and the standard version of Six Degrees throws it away. So that became our starting move: Put it back. We used billing position as a stand-in for how prominent a role was. It is not a perfect measure, and we say so plainly in the paper. But it is systematic, it exists for nearly every film, and it captures something real that a plain step count cannot.

Building the map

The math is gentle, and the intuition carries most of it. Give the top-billed actor in a film a score near one. Give the last name in a crowded cast a score near zero. Everyone else falls in between, scaled to how big the cast is, so being fifth of six is very different from being fifth of sixty. That single number is a role’s prominence.

Then connect the actors. Two actors who share a film get a link, and the strength of that link is just the prominence they each brought to it, added up across every film they made together. Star in three big movies as the two leads and your tie is heavy. Pass through one packed ensemble in the back row and it is feather-light. Repeated, prominent teamwork builds strong bonds. A single low-billed brush with fame does not.

FIG 2 · PLACEHOLDERthe same tangle from the opening, collapsed into a weighted actor-to-actor map. Thicker lines mean heavier, more prominent collaboration; the movie nodes are gone.

We ran this over a large slice of Hollywood: 259,489 actors across 20,236 feature films, all produced by U.S.-based companies and released between 1950 and 2025. Then we asked the network the question the game asks, but with the weights turned on. Who is actually central? We measured it three ways. One for raw reach, how close an actor sits to everyone else. One for bridging, how often an actor is the connection between two other people. And one, a weighted version of the same algorithm that once ranked web pages, for influence: You count for more when the people you are tied to count for more.

So who is the center?

Kevin Bacon is not first on any of the three. In our network he ranks 141st on average distance to everyone else, 181st on influence, and 202nd on bridging. Respectable. Firmly in the top few hundred out of a quarter million. But nowhere near the throne the game handed him.

First on all three, by a clear margin, is Samuel L. Jackson.

FIG 3 · PLACEHOLDERthe leaderboard, Bacon's three ranks (141, 181, 202) side by side with Jackson's three first-place finishes.

Jackson gets there the honest way: Volume and range. He has 142 films to Bacon’s 64, and he spread them across genres, budgets, and franchises, from the Marvel movies to Star Wars.

FIG 4 · PLACEHOLDERcast-size distributions for Bacon's films versus Jackson's, showing how often Jackson turns up in the very large franchise ensembles that generate the most connections.

Every one of those big ensembles ties him to more prominent collaborators, and every prominent collaborator passes a little influence back to him. His career is a dense web of repeated, high-billed work, and that is exactly what the weighted network rewards.

None of this is a knock on Kevin Bacon, and the numbers do not read as one. He has had a long, real, well-connected career: 64 films over five decades, most of them at or near the top of the billing. In our own analysis he lands in the same small elite tier of actors that Jackson does. He belongs in the core. He just is not the single most central person in it. What the game got wrong was not that Bacon is well connected. It is that it picked a convenient name and built a myth on it. His fame as the reference point turns out to be as much cultural as it is structural.

Which points at the real lesson, and it is a better one than “Bacon loses to Jackson.” The game asked how few steps separate two actors. That is the easy question. The harder and more interesting one is what those steps are made of, and who sits at the intersections that actually matter. Once you weight the crowd, Hollywood stops looking like a flat web where everyone is two or three hops apart. It starts looking like a structure with a center, a middle, and a vast edge.

Room for a sequel

That structure is the part I keep coming back to. Underneath these rankings is a whole stratified Hollywood, a handful of tiers that separate the core from the margins, and the strata deserve their own essay. This one was about the door everyone already knows how to open. The next one is about the rooms behind it.

Find yourself in it

The version of this you really want is one you can play with. Type in your favorite actor and watch where they land. Type in the person who linked them to Bacon and see how heavy that link actually is. That version is coming. A live, searchable map is next on the bench, and the concept page is up now at /work/kevin-bacon/. Go break the game a little.

A closing caveat, in the spirit of the paper. We only looked at films tied to U.S. production companies, so a lot of the world’s cinema is not in this map. Billing order is a proxy, not the truth of a performance. And this is a single snapshot from 1950 to 2025, which means it cannot tell you whether Bacon was ever the center, only that he is not now. Maybe in 1994, the year three friends put him on television, he really was. Reconstructing the network at that moment is a question for another day. For now, the center of the acting universe has a different name, and he has earned it one heavy credit at a time.

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This essay is based on “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and The Weighted Hollywood Actor Network,” by Joseph Richardson and Joe DeMaio, School of Data Science & Analytics, Kennesaw State University, accepted at CAC 2026 and presented in Las Vegas in April 2026.