Kevin Bacon and his wife, actress Kyra Sedgwick, were given an unexpected family-history shock when they appeared on Finding Your Roots in 2013. The couple, who met while working on Lemon Sky, married in 1988 and have two children. Neither expected the genealogy show to reveal a connection between their family trees.

During the episode, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. showed Sedgwick a photograph of her ninth cousin once removed. When he revealed the person was none other than Kevin Bacon, Sedgwick immediately reacted: “I knew it!” She had apparently worried the show might discover a connection between them. She quickly added that as long as they weren’t first cousins, everything was fine.

The surprises didn’t stop there. Bacon was also told that he and Brad Pitt are 13th cousins twice removed, while he and former President Barack Obama share a common ancestor. Bacon jokingly responded, “I knew I wasn’t getting enough respect.” The distant family connections only added to the actor’s already famous reputation for being connected to practically everyone in Hollywood.

That reputation inspired the famous “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, where players try to connect any actor to Bacon through their movie roles in six steps or fewer. Bacon initially thought the game was simply making fun of him. But considering he has both an enormous Hollywood network and a surprising family connection to his own wife, perhaps the joke was always a little more fitting than he realized.