Spacey in role as Balkan leader

Plays nationalist in Croatian film

ZAGREB, Croatia — A hagiographic movie about the stiff former leader of a small Balkan country was never going to be a global box-office hit. But its director, a former water polo champion turned darling of right-wing Croatian cinema, found a novel way to generate some buzz: He cast Kevin Spacey as its star.

While Hollywood has generally turned its back on Spacey because of sexual assault accusations against him, purging the 63-year-old from its roster of bankable talent and deleting him from productions already in the works, a new cinematic tribute to a nationalist leader some view as a dangerous bigot puts the “House of Cards” star front and center.

The 90-minute film celebrates Croatia’s first president, the late Franjo Tudjman, a leader revered by fans as a Balkan George Washington but reviled by foes as an ethnonationalist zealot. The movie, “Once Upon a Time in Croatia,” goes into general release in Croatia in February and will be screened in other countries, including the United States.

The director, Jakov Sedlar, 70, conceded in an interview that, in Croatia, many people, particularly the young, do not care much about Tudjman, a highly divisive authoritarian figure whom historian Tony Judt described as “one of the more egregiously unattractive” leaders to emerge in the early 1990s from the rubble of Yugoslavia, of which Croatia was a part.

Warren Zimmerman, who was the US ambassador to Yugoslavia as the multiethnic country unraveled, warned in a 1992 cable to Washington that Tudjman’s election as Croatia’s president in May 1990 had brought to power “a narrow-minded, crypto-racist regime” that, in tandem with Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, was unleashing “nationalism, the Balkan killer.”

But having Spacey play Tudjman, the director said last week in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, “will definitely help” break through a wall of what is at best public indifference and at worst fierce hostility toward the man who led Croatia’s battle for independence.

The director declared that Tudjman, who died in 1999, “was not a nationalist, but a patriot, an absolutely positive personality.” And Spacey, a two-time Oscar winner and a friend of the director for more than a decade, “is the best of the best actors” and “absolutely innocent,” Sedlar said.

Both men, Sedlar says, have been unjustly maligned: Spacey by accusers like Anthony Rapp, a fellow actor whose battery claim against the disgraced star was thrown out in October by a New York civil court, and Tudjman by domestic political rivals and foreign critics angry over his role in the destruction of Yugoslavia.

The director said Spacey had taken the part out of friendship, and had neither asked for nor received any payment.