Are Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon the same person? This question was once posed on Quora — and was answered, once and for all, thanks to "Leave the World Behind," an apocalyptic Netflix thriller.
While the ominous ending has its mysteries, the movie did dismantle the long-held internet joke that the two actors are actually one and the same.
The movie marks the first time the two A-listers have co-starred. Hawke plays Clay, a Brooklyn dad who goes to a Long Island rental home just before the world ends. Bacon's Danny sees the apocalypse coming and isn't gentle to his less prepared neighbors.
Director Sam Esmail addressed the theories in an interview with Forbes.
“I didn’t realize this, but there’s this sort of conspiracy theory out there that Ethan and Kevin were the same person,” he said. I’m happy to dispel that myth and actually show them in the same shot."
Fans seem to think the two actors share a resemblance. One viewer on X wrote, "I thought Kevin Bacon was Ethan Hawke in this movie … like fr fr … Do they look alike or am I buggin?."
"They’re the same person in my eyes," another user quipped.
Someone else thought they really were the same person cast as different people "to make the film even more trippy."
Reddit has three-year-old and three-month-old threads dedicated to the theory, with the original poster writing, "Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon are not the same person, duh, right? Yeah well I just recently found out."
Hawke has also talked about getting mistaken for Kevin Bacon in the past during a press junket interview for "Leave the World Behind" with TV personality Chris Van Vliet.
In the interview, Hawke joked, "I thought for the premiere, Kevin and I should wear like, 'I am Kevin Bacon' and he should wear 'I am Ethan,'" to throw fans off further and play into the conspiracies."
The duo addressed the internet's doppelganger theory in an interview with Netflix — and were tested on their own abilities to tell themselves apart.
"We heard the internet thinks we look alike. We are going to tell how well we can tell each other apart," Bacon said in the video.
The catch? All the photos they were shown were magnified. The duo were tripped up multiple times. “You know what’s really weird is, I don’t even know,” Bacon said, staring at a picture of an eye.
Bacon guessed it was Hawke; it turned out to be his own eye. Bacon's shock came through when he said, "What? I don't even ... what era is that? I definitely don't recognize."
Hawke wrapped the interview with a lighthearted quip to Bacon. "I mean, I really have signed your name for people before," he says.
"When they tell me how great I was I was in 'Footloose,' I go, 'Yeah I, was,'" he continued.
