Philadelphia native Kevin Bacon will play an FBI agent alongside Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman and Michelle Monaghan in the upcoming feature 'Patriots Day,' a drama that traces the sequence of events surrounding the deadly Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15, 2013.
Directed by Peter Berg and co-financed by CBS Films and Lionsgate, 'Patriots Day' will recreate the citywide manhunt to track down Chechen brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the aftermath of the attack near the marathon's finish line. Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown, where a federal indictment said his brother – sentenced to death last June – ran him over with an SUV.
Bacon, who last played an FBI agent in the Whitey Bulger mob thriller 'Black Mass,' has been cast as the FBI's Special Agent in Charge, Richard Deslauriers, who retired from a 26-year career a few months after the attack. Deslauriers led the FBI's counterterrorism investigation in 2013 and was previously involved in the 2011 capture of Bulger, who had been a fugitive for 16 years.
“Richard DesLauriers worked tirelessly as one of the key figures in an impossibly sophisticated investigation and Kevin Bacon possesses the intelligence and empathy to portray him,” Berg told Yahoo News.
Bacon is also reportedly working on a television sequel to his 1990 classic 'Tremors,' a revival of the mutant worm-fighting saga that landed on then-SciFi Channel in 2003 without Bacon's participation. He is expected to reprise his character Valentine McKee who battled the monsters in the fictional Nevada town of Perfection.
'Patriots Day' will premiere on Dec. 21, 2016.