A FULL DECK
When Kevin Spacey isn’t transforming TV with ’House of Cards’ or revolutionising London theatre, he’s parachuting South African filmmakers into Hollywood. Carlos Amato spoke to him in Los Angeles
WE have an audience with Kevin Spacey at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard. It’s a pigeon-grey fake castle on a hillside — and a place consecrated in Hollywood mythology as a refuge for burnt-out stars. Greta Garbo holed up here for years. Led Zep and Jim Morrison debauched here. John Belushi died here, of an overdose.
Spacey, who has just turned 55, is anything but burnt out. Despite the 32degree heat on the patio where he is giving interviews, he casts a radius of surplus energy. A swarm of PR aides and production crew whirl around him like whispering electrons. If we’re talking combustion, then he is the arsonist, not the victim: his entrepreneurial chutzpah has left smoke billowing across the US television industry.
In 2011, the cable networks sniffed at Spacey’s pitch for his political drama series House of Cards. They wanted to see a pilot. Spacey and his production company Trigger Street declined. Instead they offered the project to streaming media company Netflix, whose CEO Reed Hastings needed no begging to cut out the middleman, foot the $100-million production bill and dish up the show to hundreds of millions of viewers in two fullseason batches. The artistic and commercial success of House of Cards has torched the old laws of the TV business.
But more on that later. We (a motley posse of South African journalists) are in Los Angeles to talk about another of Spacey’s disruptive schemes: the Jameson First Shot, an annual short-film screenplay contest. It parachutes three young filmmakers — one apiece from
‘Support the arts, South Africans. We can do and say things culturally that we can’t politically’
South Africa, Russia and the US — into Hollywood director’s chairs, with a star at their service to perform in all three shorts. This year’s A-lister is Uma Thurman, following Spacey and Willem Dafoe in the first two editions. Adrien Brody has signed up for next year.
It’s surely no coincidence that the three nations share a long-standing commitment to distilled booze, but Spacey says the selection of Russia and South Africa was about more than the Irish whiskey brand’s marketing strategy.
“We wanted to go to places where the film industry is not where it should be,” he says. “Where not enough filmmakers are being given an opportunity to tell their own stories, to embrace and own their culture. The truth is, there’s a lot of money in South Africa — a lot of new money, in particular, a lot of young people who’ve come into money, and I say to them: support culture. Support the arts. We can do things and say things culturally that we can’t politically.”
Spacey may be a little optimistic about South Africa’s cash balance, but he’s not wrong about the hobbled state of the country’s theatre and cinema. “When I travel doing work for the Old Vic (the venerable West End theatre where he is artistic director), I visit countries that spend a tremendous amount of money on building a national theatre,” he says. “All the facilities you could possibly hope for; this extraordinary building. And what do they do in it? They farm in Cirque du Soleil. That’s not your culture. You should be having writing and directing programmes, and support the idea that young people have stories to tell.”
South Africa’s First Shot winner this year is Henco Jacobs (Henco J), 33, a muscle-bound actor and director from Pretoria, who has played various small roles in local soapies. In his film, The Mundane
Goddess, Thurman plays Hera, wife of Zeus and queen of the Greek pantheon, now reduced to a suburban housewife
whose frustrated sense of disempowerment drives her to consult a shrink.
Shot in just two days in LA, the film strikes a note of dry whimsy; both of the previous South African shorts deployed a similarly light and hyperbolic touch. In Alan Shelley’s Spirit of a Den
ture , Spacey played a mild suburban dentist suddenly confronted with a pirate in an agony of toothache. And in Hanneke Schutte’s Saving Norman, Dafoe plays a hypochondriac former ping-pong star, morbidly obsessed with the world title he once lost due to catching a cold.
The competition’s brief gives participants (who must be at least 25 years old) a choice of three themes: “Legendary”, “Humorous” and “A Very Tall Tale”. No extreme violence or substance abuse can be depicted, and no characters should be younger than 25.
“It helps the filmmaker narrow it down: this is the kind of story I’m going to tell,” says Spacey. “Rather than saying: ‘ Here’s a blank canvas, you can do whatever the f*** you want.’ And knowing who’s going to star is also very helpful because it allows the brain’s processes to be focused on a particular idea.
“It’s a little bit like what our playwrights go through in the 24hour Play project we do in London. We start at midnight with six playwrights. We put them in a hotel room and by seven in the morning they have to deliver a one-act play. We film them through the course of the night, and very often at 3am they’re going: ‘So I’ve written … uh … uh … a character’s name. And that’s all. What time is it? Can I get some more coffee?’ But it’s an extraordinary experiment: the teams rehearse all day long and perform the plays at 7pm.
“What I love about it is that no matter how famous someone is, how many awards they’ve won, it reduces them right back to their first drama-school audition. It evens everybody out, they’re all on the same level, and all sh***ing their f***ing pants. When it’s done, they all want to come back the next year. Because their heart has beaten faster than it has in 25 years — and I think that’s a very valuable thing for an artist.”
Three decades after his own big break, Spacey remains thrilled and amused by the terror of the audition moment — by the balls required to stare back into the Medusa gaze of the showbiz machine and make it succumb. Later that evening, during the First Shot premiere at the YouTube Space, he describes with relish how he and producer Dana Brunetti tormented each of the three winners during video Skype calls they made to inform them they had won. “We started off by saying to them: ‘Unfortunately, you will not be able to enter the contest next year.’ Then we paused, and saw their faces fall. And then we said: ‘That’s because you will be making your movie THIS year!’ ” Cue delirium.
This is what he calls “sending the elevator back down” — a phrase he loves to use. He inherited it from his hero and mentor, Jack Lemmon.
At the First Shot premiere, Spacey recounted how as a 13year-old, he attended a workshop for young actors. “When I did a scene from a play, [Lemmon] walked over to me, this little 13year-old, slightly shy kid who dreamt of being an actor, and he put his hand on my shoulder, and he said: ‘That was a touch of terrific. You should know you’re a born actor. You should go to New York, and you should study acting, because you were meant to do this for a living. You should do this, I’m telling you.’ ”
He complied, and studied drama at Juilliard — but for a couple of years after graduation he got nowhere, landing only understudy jobs. When Lemmon came to New York to play the lead in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Spacey knew he needed to play his son. So he took action. First, he attended a lecture by the production’s director, Jonathan Miller, and spotted, protruding from the handbag of a slumbering old lady, an invitation to a cocktail party for Miller. He stole the invite.
At the party, Miller was hemmed in by great authors and millionaire guests, as Spacey
At any moment, he
can switch on a chilling undercurrent of stealth, aggression
or worse
recounted in a speech in April this year. “At one point,” he said, “Kurt Vonnegut got up and went to the men’s room, and I was at the bar at this point, drinking, heavily. And he didn’t come back, and I was like, ‘There’s a f***ing empty chair next to Miller. I am going to go sit in it.’ So I went in a beeline to the chair, and I sat down and had a conversation with him, and convinced him, in the course of half an hour, to audition me for Long Day’s
Journey.”
That was the start — an oldschool hustle. And Spacey is not the sort of actor who was always going to make it big, in the way that Al Pacino was, or Meryl Streep was.
He is certainly a masterful technician, capable of high tragedy and broad comedy and everything in between. But his presence is not irresistible. Spacey has an American everyman’s face, a cipher, more canvas than artwork. A face that might easily have been lost in the crowd. Conventionally and unremarkably handsome, Spacey wields a generic whiteness — not ethnic, not quite Waspy — and presents a vocal and physical surface of sunny Californian optimism. But at any moment he can switch on, at will, a chilling undercurrent of stealth, aggression or worse.
That sounds like routine politics — and Frank Underwood, the honey-tongued Machiavelli of
House of Cards, is the ultimate project for Spacey’s protean quality. (Spacey says some real-life denizens of Capitol Hill have told him the show is 90% accurate — with the only implausible plot point being the fact that “nobody could get an education bill passed that fast”.)
Underwood is the urbanest yet in a dynasty of urbane Spacey villains, stretching all the way back to Roger “Verbal” Kint in
The Usual Suspects and John Doe in Seven, the performance that bumped him into the big leagues. But Spacey’s finest portrayals have explored much subtler psychologies — as the doomed suburban dropout Lester Burnham in American Beauty, and as Al Gore’s improbably dignified campaign chief Ron Klain in the acclaimed made-for-TV film
Recount . For Spacey, his magical ability to reconfigure his identity on screen and stage is depends on the privacy of his core: he refuses to discuss his personal life with the media. “I just don’t buy into that the personal can be political,” he told the Daily Beast in 2010. “I just think that’s horseshit. No one’s personal life is in the public interest. It’s gossip, bottom line. End of story.”
He’s public property until the credits roll. And that’s more than enough material.