Cast and Characters (Footloose) Footloose
Principal Cast
Ren McCormack — Kevin Bacon
A Chicago kid relocated to a Midwestern town that has banned the medium he uses to make sense of his own life. Bacon plays Ren with a coiled, antic physicality — the tie, the cassettes, the warehouse solo — and lets the dancer recede whenever Ren has to be still and argue. The performance was the breakthrough that turned a working New York stage actor and Diner (1982) ensemble player into an overnight star.
Ariel Moore — Lori Singer
The reverend's daughter, already in open rebellion when Ren arrives — climbing out the window of a moving car, dating the local bully, daring her father at the dinner table. Singer, a Juilliard-trained cellist who had played a music student on the Fame television series, brings a long-limbed athleticism to the part and a wariness that reads as inherited grief. Singer remembered her first meeting with Bacon plainly:
"The second we said hello and shook hands, it was almost electric." — Lori Singer, Yahoo Entertainment (2024)
Reverend Shaw Moore — John Lithgow
The architect of the dance ban, a small-town minister who lost his son in the car wreck that started everything and has been legislating his grief ever since. Lithgow plays Shaw not as a hypocrite or a fanatic but as a man whose love for his community has fused with his fear of it. The performance was Lithgow's third major film role of the early 1980s, after Oscar-nominated turns in The World According to Garp (1982) and Terms of Endearment (1983).
Vi Moore — Dianne Wiest
Shaw's wife, the household's emotional translator, the person who finally says out loud the thing the film has been circling: that her husband has confused control with care. Wiest plays Vi with a quiet that is almost domestic camouflage — until she lands the line. Two years later, Wiest would win her first Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986); Vi Moore is the early sketch of the warmth she would build a career on.
Willard Hewitt — Chris Penn
The farm kid who can't dance, the comic relief who turns into the loyal lieutenant. Penn plays Willard as slow but never stupid, an immovable object with a soft center, and the dance lesson — Willard learning to count to four to "Let's Hear It for the Boy" — is one of the film's set pieces.
Rusty — Sarah Jessica Parker
Willard's girlfriend, Ariel's friend, the chorus voice of the Bomont teenage social scene. Parker had nearly turned the part down — she was asked to dye her hair red, and refused, and the producers eventually relented. (wikipedia)
Supporting Cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Frances Lee McCain | Ethel McCormack |
| Jim Youngs | Chuck Cranston |
| Douglas Dirkson | Burlington Cranston |
| Lynne Marta | Lulu Warnicker |
| Arthur Rosenberg | Wes Warnicker |
| Sarah Jessica Parker | Rusty |
| John Laughlin | Woody |