Playing games with Gifted

Let’s play a twisted version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon! Do you know it? It's a parlor game based on the six degrees of separation concept, where movie buffs challenge each other to find the shortest path between an arbitrary actor and prolific character actor Kevin Bacon.

I watched Gifted this weekend. It’s a cute family drama about an uncle trying to raise his gifted niece. It hit all the right notes -- the kid is spunky and super cute, it includes Fred the 'monocular' cat (they actually used that word!), and the plot climax made me weepy. I also recently watched the newest Jason Bourne movie. So as I’m prone to do on occasion, I started to wonder if I could link Chris Evans and Matt Damon through their movies and mutual cast members. First I turned to my favorite movie resource IMDB looking through their respective credits, but nothing jumped out at me. I gave up and went to the Oracle of Bacon. I dropped their names in and was surprised to find they are only separated by two degrees and there were more than a few links too! My favorite shared cast member was Michael Pena. He was in The Martian with Damon and in Ant-Man with Evans. I disagreed with the Ant-Man link for only a second until I realized in typical Marvel fashion, Captain America made a cameo.