How ‘The Bondsman’ Brings Together Kevin Bacon’s Acting & Music — With a Devilish Twist

The Bondsman is coming to raise some hell on Prime Video. The horror-comedy series, which premieres in full on Thursday (April 3), features Kevin Bacon as Hub Halloran, a divorced ex-musician-turned-bondsman who is murdered in cold blood but gets brought back from the dead to do the devil’s bidding. As he hunts down demons who escaped from the netherworld and now roam the Earth, his estranged family is steadily ensnared in the mayhem.

The Southern gothic-tinged series is gory, wild, and often wickedly hilarious, and it has a surprisingly steady heartbeat in the original songs co-created by Bacon and Jennifer Nettles, the lead vocalist for Sugarland-turned-actress who stars as his still-beloved ex-wife Maryanne. Not only do they perform songs they wrote together in character (in Hub’s case, in flashbacks), but they also recorded and will release a soundtrack with even more show-inspired numbers called The Bondsman: Hell and Back, dropping one day after the show premieres.

Bacon, who’s in a folk band with his brother Michael, was initially hesitant about the notion of bringing his two professional ventures together for the series.

“I’ve never really wanted to try and combine those two just to shoehorn music into something that I was doing as an actor, only because I think that it has the potential to kind of cheapen both of them, both of which I take pretty seriously,” he told TV Insider. However, he found that writing songs and performing them in character helped elucidate certain elements of his character. “I would be writing songs from my character’s point of view of 15 or 20 or 25 years earlier — because he hasn’t picked up a guitar since he broke up with his wife — and that seemed like … if nothing else, a great character exercise. It’s the ultimate backstory or ride-along for him to actually write a tune that’s about what you were feeling as that character.”

The casting of Nettles as Maryanne, a nightclub singer who is raising their teen son in what used to be the family business, helped the process along in a big way.

“Jennifer was cast, not because of her great singing voice or great writing skills or her history with country music but because she was the best person for the role,” Bacon explained. “Right away, we started talking about writing stuff together, and we wrote a song. Then we wrote a couple more when we were down in Georgia, and I wrote one with my brother… we ended up with all these tunes, three of which are in the show, but the rest of them, we decided to record because Jen said, ‘We need to get these down.’ And we ended up with what I think is a pretty cool record.”

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Maxwell Jenkins, who plays their son Cade, found stepping into a recording booth with Nettles for a key scene to be “daunting,” but he relished the opportunity to be surrounded by so many other actor-musicians in the cast. “I never really had the opportunity to bridge [music and acting] in a project, especially to this degree where it’s such an integral part of the story and the family dynamic that we have,” he said. “It was a dream come true for sure.”

Beth Grant, who plays Hub’s mother Kitty, a raucous woman who’s determined to protect her son — even from the underworld — and see his family united, also learned to play an instrument for the series: “I’ve been learning to play the autoharp … It really is a fabulous instrument,” she said.

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As central as the soundtrack is, of course, The Bondsman is still a dark demon-hunting story first and foremost, and what sets the show apart from others of its ilk is the bold genre-blending that’s in play throughout.

“What makes the show original and unique is that genre mashup that you’ve never seen before in any other kind of show. We’ve seen demon hunter kind of shows before, ad nauseam, but you’ve never seen that combined with a family dramedy. You’ve never seen that combined with a country music angle, or Appalachian noir, or in this setting,” showrunner Erik Oleson added. “We had different kinds of dials where we wanted to create this escapist mash-up where you have horror, you have all those other elements, but you also don’t know whether you’re gonna laugh, you don’t know whether you’re gonna scream… Maybe I watch a family do a jam-out session on a porch; maybe you’re gonna see Kevin Bacon plunge a chainsaw through a demon’s face. I don’t know! That’s the fun of the show.”

Also unique? The increasingly zany demonic creatures featured throughout, which give the series an episodic procedural-style feel as Hub and his helpers track them down. Oleson, who executive produced the series from a script first written by Grainger David, went to great lengths to create creatures that were unique for The Bondsman‘s menagerie of hellish demons.

“I looked into Dante. I looked into demonology books. I looked into the gods of Wiki. And I then decided to just make up the demons,” he explained. “I wanted to create our own original versions and named them demons that sounded like they were real demons. But I think part of the fun of the show is that we’ve created our own mythology.”  

The Bondsman, Series Premiere (all episodes), Thursday, April 3, Prime Video