‘I’m plotting something really big’

As he stars in a dark new w thriller, Kevin Spacey tells Robbie e Collin how personal tragedy has as given him a new thirst for life

Kevin Spacey is a man who knows when to get on his bike. Take the morning of our interview, a balmy Wednesday in June on which central London is even more than usually snarled with traffic. In transit to our meeting place – a chic West End hotel – he abandons his taxi and leaps on a rental bicycle, or so I’m told by a neatly dressed man with a moustache and clipboard whose job entails keeping abreast of Spacey’s movements, for today at least.

Minutes later, Spacey glides in sweat-free and bang on time, despite having made an iced latte pit stop en route. Smiling hungrily, and dressed in a sharp navy blazer, striped tie and chinos, he looks like a crocodile disguised as a Rotarian. But as he slouches into an armchair and amiably lobs the screwed-up wrapper of his drinking straw towards a wastepaper basket in the corner – a near miss – I start to wonder if my wary first impression was entirely fair.

It was certainly swayed by the fact that Spacey’s career is currently in the sixth fruitful year of its death-dealing control freak phase, a character type at which the 57-year-old actor has proved remarkably adept. First came his three-month stint as Richard III at the Old Vic – a production of the Shakespeare play, directed by Sam Mendes, that was called the crowning glory of his 11-year creative directorship at the London theatre.

Next came six seasons of Netflix’s glossily rancorous political serial House of Cards, in which Spacey plays President Frank Underwood – a character whose original incarnation, in a series of novels by the British author and Conservative peer Michael Dobbs, was partly inspired by Richard III and Macbeth. And this week, we have the first film Spacey shot since leaving the Old Vic in 2015: Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, a car-chase thriller in which he plays Doc, the dark mind and barbed tongue behind a madcap Atlanta bankrobbing crew. It’s a role, like those other two, that turns on the classic Spacey bark/ bite conundrum: you think his character can’t possibly be as scary as he sounds, and then he actually gets to work.

There were hints of that in his performance in The Usual Suspects, too: the first in a quartet of towering film roles that made his reputation and won him two Academy Awards in five years flat. (The others were Se7en, L.A. Confidential and American Beauty.)

This kind of actor-audience tension reminds Spacey of Shakespeare – a lot does – and specifically, the way theatre-goers around the world reacted when, as a raging Richard III, he directly addressed members of the audience while pouring out his nefarious schemes. (The theatrical technique was adopted by House of Cards, to similarly chilling ends.)

“In 12 different theatres in 12 different cities around the world, I was looking into the audience’s eyes and seeing the same extraordinary reaction everywhere: ‘This is so awesome, I’m in on it, I’m a co-conspirator!’” he recalls. “And they kept totally supporting him, right up until the moment they find out he murdered the kids. Then when I looked at them it was like, ‘Oh, f---,’” he beams.

Spacey sets about his work with a steely resolve and says his sense of purpose has redoubled following the deaths of a number of close friends, not least the actor Tim Pigott-Smith, in April of this year, and the theatre director Howard Davies last October, both of whom worked with Spacey on the 1999 Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh.

He says he’s spent the last year-and-a-half “working with a whole series of experts, doctors and others, because I have watched, over the last six years, colleagues and friends of mine drop dead at 52, or 56, or 65. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get one of the five things that men over 50 are getting, but maybe you can hold it off until your 80s or your 90s. So I’m working on extending my life and not shortening it.”

For one thing, he still has so much to do. He’s written letters asking directors he admires – Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Wong Kar-wai – to bear him in mind for future roles. (“I keep opening the paper and reading that Woody Allen’s doing a film with Alec Baldwin,” he mock-splutters.) He wants to find a new creative director-like role that will “advance [his] love and appreciation of theatre” – another Old Vic gig, essentially – albeit “with the caveat that I don’t want to run a building again.”

Then this tantalising prospect: “I have a gigantic project for television,” he says. “Once House of Cards is finished. This is a very specific project that will be the next big thing I do.” He declines to elaborate, so I ask if it will reunite him with David Fincher, the director who, along with the playwright Beau Willimon, helped bring House of Cards to Netflix. “It is not a Fincher production,” he replies. “It’s mine.”

There is also his ongoing mission to open up theatre to a younger, broader crowd. At the Old Vic he relentlessly raised funds to keep the theatre running without public subsidy, while simultaneously fighting to bring its productions to new audiences – specifically, youngsters who wouldn’t have otherwise wandered through its doors.

In fact, he’s just returned to England from New York, and a restaging of his penultimate Old Vic production – David W. Rintels’ intimate one-man show Clarence Darrow, about the American civil rights lawyer – in a 23,000-seater tennis stadium in Queens, designed to bring in a crowd for whom Broadway is alien turf. Critics didn’t exactly take to the idea, with the New York Times branding the exercise a “folly”. But for Spacey, the bragging rights are in the numbers: 200 student tickets sold every night, and a further 250 given

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