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,^b3 dating the local bully,¹ daring her father at the dinner table.² 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.^b21 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.^b20 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.^b25

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