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We need to talk about Kevin
In defence of Kevin Spacey the actor, by Ta n y a G o l d
T
he sixth and final season of House
of Cards has begun without Kevin
Spacey, who played the murder-
ous Democratic American president Frank
Underwood. Netflix fired Spacey when he
was accused of multiple sexual assaults last
year, although he is not yet charged with
any crime. The longed-for dénouement of
Frank Underwood — the moment when
he realises his crimes have been in vain —
never came. Instead his wife Claire, so love-
ly in looks, is now president. (It’s TV.) When
the trailer for the final season appeared,
Underwood was already in his grave, with
Claire, played by Robin Wright, standing
over it. Wright gave an interview saying that
she had never known Kevin Spacey, which
made me smile, because it is exactly what
Claire would have said.
I don’t write to defend Spacey as a man.
I met him once and got the freezing stare he
gave to all journalists who sought something
of him beyond that which he wished to give.
Criminal or not, he was a man with secrets,
and I expected, and deserved, nothing else.
He didn’t sign autographs at the stage door
of the Old Vic, where he was artistic director
from 2004 to 2015. Rather he signed them
through a slot in the door — and why not?
There is something hateful about the way
we crawl over actors, looking for a narrative
they give better, and more freely, on screen.
But I am angry that he fell without trial.
If #MeToo and #TimesUp take away the
presumption of innocence, we will be worse
off. If Spacey is not tried, and therefore not
convicted — a few enquiries have come to
nothing, owing to the statute of limitations,but others are ongoing — he should return
to acting. But I fear he won’t. Hollywood
is filled with hypocrisy, and its sins against
beautiful young men and women are so
numerous that it must pretend to atone
before it offers up the next body.
I was surprised by none of it. It was all
there to see in the product. Cinema doesn’t
have to be so rotten, but it is. There is profit in
exploitation, and I saw it in House of Cards
too, when a young woman’s naked body
wandered, so pointlessly, across the screen.
But I can defend Spacey the actor and
say that he was always fascinating becausehe was amoral. He can do charm, vulnerabil-
ity, rage — anything but sincerity. Compare
him with today’s rising leading men — they
all seem to be called Chris, and they are
handsome, like Labradors — and he is all
risk. I suppose Benedict Cumberbatch is the
closest — his face is similarly awry, his talent
as large — but Cumberbatch, you sense, is
essentially wholesome. Spacey is not.
He has two Oscars, for The Usual Sus-
pects (1995) and American Beauty (1999),
which have yet to be recalled. But there is
time. He has a new name, too — his original
was Kevin Fowler, and it suits him much bet-
ter. Spacey, already, sounds like reinvention.
Fame came late; he was never handsome,
just sensuous and dangerous. If you are glib,
he looks like an evil baby that is capable
of anything.His breakthrough roles were the liar —
though liar is really too small a word for
what Verbal Kint was — in The Usual Sus-
pects, and the dreamer Lester Burnham in
American Beauty. He was also an intellec-
tual — and therefore hack — serial killer in
Seven (1995), but he did it better than any-
one else. When he removed Gwyneth Pal-
trow’s head, and made Brad Pitt cry, you
were glad. Then there was Jack Vincennes
in L.A. Confidential (1997), the best film
of the 1990s. LA was a corrupt town, and
no one was more believably corrupt than
Spacey’s cop, who arrested movie stars for
drugs offences and tipped off the press,
so that he could be famous. He looked
stunned when he died.
His best roles, then, are closest to what
we presume he must be. He has never given
an interesting interview. He excused himself
like this: ‘It’s not that I want to create some
bullshit mystique by maintaining a silence
about my personal life. It is just that the less
you know about me, the easier it is to con-
vince you that I am that character on screen.’
In 20 years, he has given almost no interest-
ing quotations. There is this: ‘I’m attracted
to characters in some kind of moral crisis or
moral decay.’ And this: ‘I think people just
like me evil for some reason. They want me
to be a son of a bitch.’
According to his brother — a Rod Stew-
art impersonator — a violent father did for
him, giving him that gift for mimicry, the
charm, and the freezing stare. Certainly, the
offences he is accused of — mostly groping,
but some much worse — bespeak unease
with love. People who like themselves don’tSpacey the actor was
always fascinating because
he was amoral