Kevin Spacey, Holding Court in More Ways Than One
Kevin Spacey was alternately pacing like a panther and beaming like a proud parent at the back of a Juilliard School classroom one recent morning.
Students from the school’s drama division, where he had once studied, were performing while he offered advice. He asked one student to play a scene from Stephen Adly Guirgis’s “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” as if he were talking to someone on the subway. He asked another to slow her lines from Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart” and not get swallowed up in its Southern accent.
Mr. Spacey’s eyes lit up when one student gave her rendition of a speech from Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” after the title character is presented with a disdainful gift of tennis balls. “I have such a task for you,” Mr. Spacey said. Then he instructed her to play the scene as if she were in a tennis match. He told her: “You’re going to win this battle. You’re going to send them home in shame.”
When he is not teaching seminars like this one, Mr. Spacey, 57, the Academy- and Tony Award-winning actor, can be a fearsome competitor in his own work, making unexpected choices and committing to them steadfastly.
Now in a fifth season as the detestable President Underwood on Netflix’s “House of Cards” (released on May 30), Mr. Spacey has revisited a nobler role in “Clarence Darrow,” a one-man show about the civil-rights lawyer. Having previously starred in this David W. Rintels play at the Old Vic Theater in London, he just brought it to the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York for two nights.
He appears this summer as a crime boss in Edgar Wright’s action caper “Baby Driver.” And he recently followed in the footsteps of entertainers like James Corden, Hugh Jackman and Neil Patrick Harris when he hosted the Tony Awards.
From the stories he shared on this visit to Juilliard, where Mr. Spacey trained from 1979 to 1981 but did not graduate, he came across as an actor who, even as a young man, possessed singular skill and the conviction it would take him places.
Long after following his high school friend Val Kilmer there, Mr. Spacey still slips into seamless impersonations of beloved instructors like his mentor, Marian Seldes, and the fearsome voice teacher Elizabeth Smith. Mr. Spacey can also still vividly recall the disagreement he had with Michael Langham, then the director of Juilliard’s drama division, that prompted him to withdraw from the school.
Having been reprimanded for focusing too much on his acting classes, and not enough on the history of theater, Mr. Spacey recalled: “I said, ‘For two years, you’ve been teaching us how to carve out what’s important — how to emphasize, how to underscore. And now you’re telling me I can’t do that in my life?’ ”
He added: “I went, ‘I think we should call it a day.’ ”
Mr. Spacey had no job waiting for him; no agent, no prospects. But, he said, “I never lost faith that I was going to make it at some point.”
A Broadway career soon followed: By 1986, he was performing in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” with his idol Jack Lemmon, and in 1991 he won a Tony for “Lost in Yonkers.” Next came the movies, and Oscars for “The Usual Suspects” (released in 1995) and “American Beauty” (in 1999).
Mr. Spacey, who has admired “Clarence Darrow” since he saw Henry Fonda perform it in 1974, said he was inspired to bring the play to Arthur Ashe Stadium about two years ago, after attending an opening- night concert for the United States Open.
“The stage was not lit like a tennis match — it was lit like a concert,” he recalled. “I thought, drama happens on that court all the time, but it’s not used for anything other than tennis. I wonder if it could be.”
With the Juilliard students, Mr. Spacey shared a trick he used to play when he sensed an audition wasn’t going well. Stopping in midsentence, he began to sniff the air and asked, “What’s that smell? It’s me. I stink.”
“Sometimes, it’s much better that they think you know you stink,” he joked.
More sincerely, Mr. Spacey explained that the young actors would have to learn to trust their instincts. “It’s easy to get trapped in the idea that there’s a way that you have to do these things,” he said. “The only way to do them is the way you feel.”
But, he said, worrying too much about the expectations of an audience was the surest route to taking yourself out of a performance.
“The last thing you should be thinking about,” he said, “is what they’re going to think.”