Even in the midst of her Travis Kelce saga and the countdown to her Eras Tour concert film, Taylor Swift is dominating TikTok with a song and trend that aren’t connected to either of those things. On Wednesday (Sept. 27), actors Penn Badgley and Kevin Bacon joined forces for their own spin on the “August” challenge.
For some context, the TikTok challenge finds users twirling their pets to a cinematic version of “August,” a fan-favorite deep cut from Swift’s Grammy-winning Folklore album. In Badgley and Bacon’s video, which was uploaded to the You actor’s TikTok account, Badgley sprints through a hallway where he finds Bacon and spins him around as the Murder in the First actor pulls a hilarious facial expression that sits somewhere between wonder and fright. “Summer nostaligia w/ @Kevin Bacon,” Badgley captioned the photo. The two actors had also recently linked up for an episode of Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast.
Badgley has previously expressed his love for Swift — and he’s used TikTok to do so. Late last year, the actor made his TikTok debut to the tune of Swift’s “Anti-Hero,” the Billboard Hot 100-topping lead single from her Midnights album. He captioned the video, which has since garnered more than 11 million views, simply “#antihero.” While Swift has yet to comment on his team-up with Kevin Bacon, the “Karma” singer did react to his TikTok debut, commenting with a succinct “OMG!!!!🤩.”
As for Bacon, this is the Footloose actor’s second “August” challenge. On Sept. 22 he pulled off a bait-and-switch in which he set the video up to start spinning a real goat, but ended up twirling around a figurine of one instead. “No actual goats were harmed in making this video,” he joked in the caption.
Check out Penn Badgley and Kevin Bacon’s version of the Taylor Swift TikTok challenge below:
