‘There was a rush to judgment ... in four days my life finished’
And the toxicity of cancel culture means that, seven years on, Kevin Spacey has yet to get that life back
The fairminded will surely wonder how a man can be eternally damned for so little
‘They divorced themselves from me and said they would never work with me again’
HOW LONG before Kevin Spacey is allowed to be uncancelled? It has been almost seven years since he had the leper’s bell hung around his neck. Is it to be a life sentence or are the millions who relish this great actor’s performances to be allowed to see him back on stage and screen?
I must admit that, until recently, I had taken the “no-smoke-without-fire” view of Spacey. Hollywood big shot exploits his position for sexual favours – it’s the oldest story in the book.
Then I watched the new Channel 4 documentary Spacey Unmasked (Spacey Stitched Up, more like), and a long, revelatory interview in which the fallen star spoke to journalist Dan Wootton, and I completely changed my mind.
Ten men, nearly all failed actors, pour out tales of woe in the two-part documentary that pretty much add up to heavy petting plus crushing disappointment. (Spacey apparently let them down by failing to become their mentor or read their terrible screenplays.) It was not nice or acceptable behaviour, as the star now readily admits, and some will find it distasteful. However, the fair-minded will surely wonder how a man can be eternally damned for so little.
In one particularly ludicrous testimony, a classmate surfaces from high school, 48 years ago, to complain that the young Kevin Fowler, as Spacey was then, put his hand on his crotch during a car ride. That was almost obligatory for teenagers in steamed-up cars in the 1970s, as I recall.
Such is the growing feeling of injustice that several celebrities, including Sharon Stone and Liam Neeson, are beginning to speak out to demand that Spacey be given a second chance. Even Channel 4 has to admit that if the allegations are true, nothing Spacey is accused of is actually criminal. As the theatre critic and veteran journalist Libby Purves observed after watching the programme: “Even to a straight, Christian, conventional old bat like me, none of it seems worth bringing ruin on a human being.” Quite. I now feel immense compassion for Spacey, tinged with anger at the clear injustice.
Even at the peak of the Metoo movement, no one fell faster from grace than Spacey, who had scaled the dramatic heights with films such as The Usual Suspects (winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor) and American Beauty (Best Actor). “My life was finished in four days,” Spacey tells me from his Baltimore home.
He looks chipper in a plaid shirt and speaks with great eloquence, showing a consideration and restraint his accusers don’t deserve – but battling to salvage his reputation in endless court cases has clearly taken its toll. There is a vulnerability to him that surfaces when he breaks down several times during our conversation.
If this were a movie it would start here, preferably with a laconic voiceover by Spacey. In October 2017, the same month that a New York Times investigation into allegations of sexual assault by the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein set off the Metoo movement, an actor named Anthony Rapp was apparently emboldened by the outpouring of stories. He publicly accused Spacey of molesting him at a party in 1986, when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was in his late 20s. Within hours, Spacey responded on social media, saying he had no recollection of the incident, adding, “But if I did behave then as he describes, [I] owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate, drunken behaviour and I am sorry for the feelings he has described carrying with him all these years.”
He then went on to compound the damage from that notably inept statement by coming out as gay, something he had denied for years. Understandably, there was widespread outrage that Spacey appeared to have used this to excuse a sex crime.
But it wasn’t true. In 2022, a jury took 80 minutes to clear Spacey of all allegations. Rapp was subsequently ordered to pay Spacey $40,000 (£31,600) in damages. You would have thought that was pretty conclusive, wouldn’t you? But Rapp’s attorney at the time insisted that, while they accepted the jury’s verdict, “Anthony told his truth in court”.
It is the cruel catch 22 of cancel culture that being innocent may afford no protection against being treated as guilty. After Rapp came forward, Spacey swiftly lost several roles, including that of President Frank Underwood in the Netflix show House of Cards. The film director Ridley Scott excised him from his film All the Money in the World (Spacey’s scenes were re-shot with the late Christopher Plummer). “It was a business issue,” Scott said briskly, protecting his project from the contagion of toxic reputation.
I wonder if Spacey feels that the complaints against him were blown out of proportion on the rising tide of Metoo fury?
“I think that there was definitely a rush to judgment,” he says carefully. “And I think that, to some degree, corporations put themselves in a situation where they had to behave in the same way toward anyone who was accused of anything. I mean, if the companies that I had an incredible partnership with had stood up and said, ‘We hear you and we take allegations seriously and we’re going to investigate this. And when we discover what the truth is, we’re going to tell you how we’re going to react’. But, instead, they publicly divorced themselves from me and said that they would never work with me again before a single question had been asked. When Netflix did that, and we’d had enormous success together, people must have thought, ‘Well, they must have the dirt on him’. So then everyone else decided to react punitively toward me. And all I ever wanted was for people to ask questions and investigate. I am well aware that that did not happen.”
In August 2022, Spacey was ordered to pay $31 million (£25.5 million) to the producers of House of Cards over losses relating to allegations of sexual misconduct by him, after losing an appeal over the sum. But it’s a bitter irony that Netfix now refuses either to release, or to sell, Spacey’s final work for them, a biopic of the critic Gore Vidal. Vidal, who also had a predilection for younger men, should consider himself lucky that he’s dead; he’d certainly be cancelled if he were alive today.
What about the specific allegations? One young actor, who appeared in a production of Sweet Bird of Youth in 2013, when Spacey was running the Old Vic theatre, claimed he groped him in public at the Savoy. The accuser says, “He pulled me in closer and in my ear he whispered, ‘Don’t worry about it’.”
Is that true? Spacey shakes his head. “It’s not true.”
So what is the motive of someone like that to say that happened to him?
“I don’t know. But I would say this, when Anthony Rapp told his story [against me], there were a number of people who came forward to tell another story because they felt so strongly that Rapp was telling the truth. The story must be true. Well, it isn’t true and it wasn’t true. And there were other stories that followed that weren’t true, or there were parts of them that were true, or they had been exaggerated or had not happened. I think people maybe think that they’re helping and doing the right thing.”
Spacey says a lot of “incredible progress” has happened because of the Metoo movement, which is decent of
‘I never used my position in a quid pro quo ... [if I] recommended people there was no price to pay’
him since he can count himself among its biggest casualties. But he also indicates the unfairness of not giving the accused an “opportunity to have a fair shot at being able to prove either something didn’t happen or there are circumstances that make it questionable”.
The Channel 4 producers initially approached friends of Spacey for comment but when the star was found not guilty, they never called back. He says: “I think clearly they must have thought that I was going to lose the Anthony Rapp case, and by the time it came out I’d be in jail and they would be ahead of the curve. But, perhaps because they had already spent money, I think they just decided that they wanted to go ahead with it.”
This is Spacey politely saying he believes the agenda was to make an explosive take-down that would sell around the world and bury him. In fact, in the brief time since the documentary aired, Spacey and his manager, Evan Lowenstein (who has stood by him), have already come up with evidence that “at the very least calls into question some of the allegations”.
Surely he is not saying there was never any truth in multiple tales of unsolicited body contact? Spacey, who has called himself a “big flirt”, said they were “clumsy passes”.
“You’re not claiming you never behaved badly, are you?” I ask. “I am not saying that. I am absolutely accepting that, at times, I behaved poorly. I was involved in horseplay and in interactions on set that I thought were just fun. And I made a lot of jokes and, you know, sexual innuendos. And it was more common in those circumstances than it is now. And I might have been having fun because everyone was laughing. But to have learnt later in conversations I had with people I worked with that, actually, they felt I was belittling them, that was horrible to hear. I’ve had conversations with my therapist to try to get to the root of why did I do that. And to make sure that, in work environments in the future, I never put myself in a situation where I ever hurt anybody or my conduct is questionable. It’s upsetting that sometimes I behaved in ways that I will never behave in again.”
Spacey has notaby softened his tone since he posted a defiant video over Christmas 2018, Let Me Be Frank, in which he reprised his role as Frank Underwood, delivering a storming soliloquy smouldering with fury and contempt for those who brought him (Underwood, Spacey, or both?) down.
To watch that video today is to be reminded of the astonishing visceral power of a thespian currently in painful exile from his calling. Both mesmerising and weird at the same time, it makes you wonder about the state of mind of the man who made it.
Which is Spacey: the artistic giant who once bestrode his industry now raging at the Mccarthyite mob who took him down, or the newly therapised, humble, remorseful man I encounter? There are moments in our interview when he’s talking so compellingly, so charmingly that I find myself thinking, “But of course you’re convincing me, you’re Kevin Spacey!”
Is he acting? You can make your own minds up when you watch the video of our interview but, for what it’s worth, I believe him. He’s simply too broken, too tired to keep the mask in place, though he wants to say whatever it is that can help him “find a path back”.
Dorothy Byrne, one of the producers of Spacey Unmasked, has said she hopes it could be a Metoo moment for men. That made me laugh. Two of the accusers are former Marines so beefy they could squash Spacey like a beetle. (Any comparison with what Weinstein did are as odious as they are absurd.)
Spacey says he watched an interview with Byrne. “This is a person who has decided she’s judge, jury, prosecutor. I mean, she talked about these things as if they’d actually happened. And we [Spacey and Lowenstein] know that we’re going to present evidence that some of those individuals pursued me for years after they claimed that I had done some terrible thing.”
The documentary begins with Daniel, who had a small part in House of Cards and accuses Spacey of touching him inappropriately on set in 2013. Three years later, after he had left the show, Daniel sent Spacey provocative pictures – at Spacey’s request – which Lowenstein sent me with a date stamp so there can be no mistake. “We were very friendly to each other,” Spacey says, “and at no time did he ever say that any of our horseplay had upset him in any way, shape or form.”
It’s all too familiar to Spacey. “There’s one case where someone accused me of something in 1998 and said they never spoke to me again, and I was a terrible person. And I have emails from this person in 2011 saying how great it was to have seen me when I was in LA and wondering whether I might put him up for a role in Captain Phillips, a film that I was producing. Does anyone see the logic in that?”
What intrigues me is the power dynamic. The two-time Oscar winner clearly exerted a powerful hold over those guys. Was there really no part of him that exploited that power?
“I’m a kid from South Orange, New Jersey, who was raised in Southern California in more-than-modest surroundings,” he says, “My father was unemployed so often that by the time I was 10 we’d moved about eight times. I look at myself as unbelievably fortunate to have been given the opportunities that I’ve had. And, you know, there’s power dynamics in every relationship. But I never used my position in a quid pro quo, ‘if you come into my trailer I’m gonna give you a part or I’ll give you an audition’ way. Doesn’t mean I didn’t recommend people to a director, but there was no price to pay. Absolutely not. Now it appears some of the accusers are saying they thought because I’d had a 15-minute conversation with them, or got stoned with them, or had a drink with them, that I was going to be their mentor, which is not what was occurring.”
Spacey kept a low profile for several years, possibly in the mistaken hope it would speed his rehabilitation. Ten months ago, a court in London cleared him of nine charges including sexual assault. Afterwards, he hoped this exoneration would mean he could finally work again. But this latest attack from Channel 4, almost calculated to derail a comeback, is too much. He is ready to break his silence and fight.
Kevin Spacey Fowler was born in July 1959 to Thomas and Kathleen. He has an elder brother, Randall (Randy), and a sister, Julie Ann. In the documentary, Randy paints a horrifying picture of their father as a brutal Nazi sympathiser who sexually abused him. Randy, “a kook” according to Lowenstein, has been selling stories about Spacey for years, though the actor has a letter from his brother thanking him effusively for a large gift of cash which saved his business. Their mother adored and protected Kevin, though it was clearly not the ideal upbringing for a sensitive, imaginative boy who may already have had confused thoughts about his sexuality.
“I didn’t know what I was,” Spacey recalls, “All I know is there were times when my father would say things that were very homophobic and upsetting, and I was certainly afraid of that. And I think that there were other things in my family that taught me very early on that secrets kept me safe. So that was automatic for me. Secrets. Now I realise it didn’t keep me safe.”
Young Kevin always wanted to be a performer and had a gift for impersonations. He could have been a stand-up comic but ended up winning a place at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York to study acting.
I think Spacey lied for so long about being gay – strenuously denying it to Playboy magazine and even telling an interviewer he had a girlfriend – because fear of his father had made him so repressed that he didn’t want to admit it, even to himself. Spacey’s jarring use of the antediluvian “horseplay” sounds like someone trapped in a more disapproving era with a lot of shame about his desires.
Being secretive, unknowable, was a huge part of Spacey’s success as an actor. In the Nineties, he enjoyed an amazing run of films: Glengarry Glen Ross (rivetingly good alongside his mentor Jack Lemmon), The Usual Suspects, Se7en and LA Confidential.
In 1999 there was American Beauty,
which won him the Oscar for playing Lester Burnham, an advertising executive having a midlife crisis and sexually obsessed with his 16-year-old daughter’s friend. Lester ends up being murdered by his in-the-closet, homophobic neighbour. As if the ghost of Thomas Fowler had come back to punish his son.
What we see in almost every Spacey performance is the importance of him remaining calm and serene however crazy the stuff going on around him is; the voice (no one ever seems to say how beautiful the voice is, but it is) has a lot to do with it. Spacey always puts on a great show, but he makes sure not to hog the stage; he doesn’t need to make that kind of effort.
Comedy is always at the edge of things, too – a lightning flash of wit in the darkness. He is also a brilliant mimic. Maybe that’s why he’s at his best when one kind of life conceals another – the mad, doomy dreamer inside the shell of the loser in American Beauty; the evil genius inside the limping lowlife in The Usual Suspects. How much of this is dramatic skill and how much pathology, who knows?
Did Spacey’s track record for playing creeps and villains make people more willing to believe ill of him when the allegations started to fly? Was there also a double standard applied to him because he wasn’t heterosexual? (Spacey wryly observes that there are a number of men “who are well known, who throughout history and even today, are what the press likes to call ‘legendary Lotharios’. You never hear a gay man called that.”)
Although our interview has moments of distress, I sense Spacey is more hopeful than he has been for a long time. He says he and Lowenstein play what they call the red-button game. “If you push the red button, it goes back in time and none of the bad stuff will have happened. Would I push the button? The answer is no. Because despite the challenges and the pain and the bad days, I’ve also witnessed beautiful demonstrations of friendship and love and family. Small moments. Making someone laugh. I wouldn’t want to miss any of those. And those far outweigh all the negative stuff.”
There are a lot of substantial figures in his industry now calling for Spacey to be allowed to resume his career. They emailed me in the past couple of days. “I can’t wait to see Kevin back at work. He is a genius,” said Sharon Stone. “He is so elegant and fun, generous to a fault and knows more about our craft than most of us ever will.”
Liam Neeson vouched for a friend who is “a good man and a man of character. He’s sensitive, articulate and non-judgmental, with a terrific sense of humour. He is also one of our finest artists. Our industry needs him and misses him greatly.”
Another great actor, The White Lotus star F Murray Abraham, bristled at the injustice. “Kevin Spacey is my friend and I vouch for him unequivocally. Who are these vultures who attack a man who has publicly accepted his responsibility for certain behaviour, unlike so many others? Has the world forgotten his huge accomplishments, not only as an actor but as leader of Britain’s most important theatre company?”
Sir Trevor Nunn, the veteran theatre director, who worked with Spacey at the Old Vic, says: “In this country, we believe in the rule of law, and consequently, that the accused is innocent until proved guilty.
“In light of the court’s verdict, surely it is time for this man to be forgiven for whatever poor judgments he may have made in the past and allowed to resume his career?”
Stephen Fry submitted a balanced testimony it’s hard to argue with. “I don’t know anybody in the profession who didn’t admire Kevin Spacey as an actor, director, producer and theatre administrator. No one can doubt that he has been clumsy and ‘inappropriate’ on many occasions – he made too many people uncomfortable, embarrassed and upset.
“To bracket him with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, however, to devote a whole documentary to accusations that simply do not add up to crimes … how can that be considered proportionate and justified?
“Surely it is wrong to continue to batter a reputation on the strength of assertion and rhetoric rather than evidence and proof? I think he has paid the price.”
And what a price. The beautiful home I see behind Spacey as he talks is in foreclosure, taken from him as so much else has been. In the past couple of years, he has been offered great roles but, at every turn, there is another block. Writers no longer object to Kevin speaking their words, actors (most of them) are OK appearing alongside him, producers and directors are cool, the sales and money men have been persuaded it’s not a liability to have the name Spacey attached to their project. Yet it seems he’s still being blocked by anonymous executives.
Who are these petty moralising gatekeepers who would keep perhaps the finest actor of his generation in the wilderness? Shame on them. I tell Spacey I think viewers would be happy to see him and he says he has had only kind comments from members of the public.
“I believe that audiences believe in me. It’s just unfortunate that a single person is speaking for the entire British public, or a few people in studios or networks or streaming services are speaking for the entire American public. I think that someone will roll the dice and say, ‘I believe in you. I believe in you as an actor, and as a human being. And I believe that you’ve learnt and that you’ve changed. And I want to give you an opportunity to come back’. And that’s going to be an opportunity I’m going to embrace and honour.”
In the days that I have been writing about Spacey, a line by the poet Thomas Wyatt has been flitting through my head. “They flee from me that sometime did me seek.”
It’s a mysterious poem, freighted with loss and sadness. There’s an actor who could do that injustice justice, who knows how it feels when people flee from you.
As we say our goodbyes, Spacey is still finding the comedy amid the darkness. A hint of a sly smile: “My hope is that, from a business perspective, my stock is low, so I’m a bargain, right?”
Oh, and what a bargain Kevin Spacey would be for anyone bold enough to offer that path back to redemption. Let him act.