Kyra Sedgwick Opens Up About ‘Space Oddity’ and Her Desire to Direct Kevin Bacon to an Oscar

Kyra Sedgwick has been acting since she was 16, stealing scenes from Julia Roberts in “Something to Talk About” and interrogating hardened criminals to Emmy-winning effect on “The Closer.” But she thinks she’s found her true calling as a director.

“I’m madly in love with it,” Sedgwick tells Variety as she prepares for “Space Oddity,” her latest directorial effort, to premiere at the Tribeca Festival. “I feel like this is what I was meant to do all along. All my years watching directors and being on set and knowing what it is like to have this giant piece of machinery in front of you and have to splay yourself open and be incredibly vulnerable, have made me able to do this in a certain kind of way.”

In “Space Oddity,” Sedgwick’s decades in front of the camera have helped her achieve a delicate balancing act between humor and heartache with a story about love and loss that strikes a chord in the pandemic era. The film centers on Alex (Kyle Allen), who has signed up for a one-way mission to Mars in the hopes of escaping a recent tragedy by starting a fresh life on a desert planet. But things get complicated after he has a “meet cute” with an insurance agent (Alexandra Shipp), who is tasked with filling out his life insurance policy. When he finds himself falling for her, he’s forced to reconsider his eagerness to be a pioneer and finds himself grappling with a family trauma he had tried to suppress.

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