Kevin Spacey: Can this sometime king of Hollywood recover his crown?

Actor Kevin Spacey has been acquitted of sexual assault. Photo / AP

Kevin Spacey seized the world’s attention by having all the answers. The film characters that propelled him to fame were cynical, controlled, and devious. When a twist landed, it was usually a given that he’d be in charge. In recent weeks, the only role he has been able to play, on a stage he has not chosen – the dock of Southwark Crown Court – has been himself. His bullish demeanour has continually made the world wonder whether this brilliant actor could defeat the slew of sexual allegations that have beset him since 2017, culminating in the criminal charges he has been facing in London. And indeed a “not guilty” verdict was delivered on Wednesday.

It’s hard to overstate Spacey’s status in the cultural and celebrity ecosystem before things went so spectacularly wrong for him. The achingly cool thriller The Usual Suspects (1995) made him the hottest character actor in town, then Sam Mendes’ rapturously received film-directing debut American Beauty (1999) cemented his stardom and pulling power. Winning Oscars for both, he was king of Hollywood.

It was theatre, though, that had launched Spacey, and would claim him back. Hailing from a middle-class family in New Jersey with a bullying father – according to both Spacey’s brother Randy Fowler and more latterly to Spacey – the young Kevin had found success early on from losing himself in roles, such as his great high school success as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. In 2022 Spacey stated that his father used to call him “a f-----”, and said this was a reason he had not come out earlier in his life.

Kevin Spacey played Frank Underwood in the series House of Cards.

Spacey went on to make his reputation on Broadway and beyond with Ibsen, Molière, Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill, and wowed London in 1998 in Howard Davies’s Almeida revival of The Iceman Cometh, as the travelling salesman who swings in after a 45-minute wait on stage. “There was a wave of anticipation that he surfed,” remembers the Variety critic David Benedict. “Theatreland was in love with him. And then there was absolutely the sense that he was being heralded as the saviour of British theatre.”

The Old Vic, one of the most prestigious of all London’s stages and the first home of the National Theatre had been struggling for years. In a move few on the outside saw coming, Spacey took on its artistic directorship in 2003 and transformed its fortunes in the process.

From then on everything at the Old Vic had a habit of selling out. Even if some productions got critically panned and Spacey cast himself a little too often, his stardust was too dazzling to matter.

The actor was also able to milk goodwill and his celebrity status to achieve game-changing corporate sponsorship from Morgan Stanley. “He was quite brilliant at using his fame, and skill at cajoling money out of people, to the Old Vic’s advantage,” Benedict confirms. “Everyone was falling all over him because he was in a very esteemed position.” He continued at the Vic until 2015.

The final feather was placed in Spacey’s acting cap when he conquered television in 2013. He was cast as the ruthless Democratic congressman Frank Underwood in House of Cards, making him the face of Netflix’s first, revolutionary move into high-end drama, with Hollywood director David Fincher calling the shots. He won a Golden Globe for it and is rumoured to have been being paid $1 million an episode towards the end.

Arguably no other actor at this time so effectively straddled the film, theatre and TV worlds. He stood at their apex. As an ally of the politically powerful too – calling Bill Clinton a close friend – he was one of the most influential and lionised celebrities in the world of entertainment.

For all these reasons, Spacey’s reputational collapse has been one of the most dramatic falls from grace we’ve seen a major star endure in the 21st century.

For years, Spacey kept his homosexuality a secret. He presented himself to the world as straight. In the 1990s he would bring script supervisor Dianne Dreyer, reported to be his partner, to awards ceremonies. An Esquire article in 1997 implied that he was gay and he denounced it as McCarthyite. Before October 2017, when the first public allegation of sexual misconduct was levelled against him, he’d only been in the headlines once before for personal reasons.

Actor Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual assault. Photo / AP

This was in April 2004, immediately prior to his press conference launching the new season at the Old Vic. Spacey had gone to a Lambeth police station to report having his phone stolen by a young man when he was supposedly walking his dog at 4.30am in a local park. Alerted to the scurrilous publicity that might arise, he then went back to the police to try to un-report it. But the damage was done.

The incident – in a known cruising ground – chimed with widespread speculation that Spacey had always been secretly gay.

The first person to accuse Spacey was the out theatre actor Anthony Rapp. Rapp said the alleged assault happened after a party Spacey threw at his Manhattan apartment in 1986 when Spacey was 26 and Rapp was just 14.

Rapp’s allegations would emerge after he filed a civil suit against Spacey in 2020, which went to trial in October 2022 in Manhattan. He claimed that Spacey was unsteady on his feet after all the other guests had left, picked Rapp up from the edge of a bed, and lifted him “like a groom carrying a bride through the threshold”. He then, according to Rapp, laid him down on the bed and pressed “his full weight” on top of Rapp’s body.

“I knew something was really wrong now,” Rapp remembered thinking, before he wriggled away, and had to temporarily shut himself in an adjacent bathroom before managing to leave. He described it as “the most traumatic event” of his life.

In 2017, Spacey’s first response to Rapp’s story was twofold. He described himself as “beyond horrified” to hear it but didn’t deny it. “I honestly do not remember the encounter,” he added, in a statement posted on social media. “It would have been over 30 years ago. 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 describes having carried with him all these years.”

Spacey also chose this very moment to come out as gay, in the later part of the same statement, claiming that the story had encouraged him “to address other things about my life.” He was immediately and intensely criticised for the opportunistic timing of this, with accusations flying that he was publicising his orientation for the first time as a smokescreen. “Coming out stories should not be used to deflect from allegations of sexual assault,” wrote Sarah Kate Ellis, president and chief executive of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, in a tweet.

This wave of publicity had immediate professional consequences for Spacey. An honorary Emmy he was supposed to be receiving was swiftly revoked. On BBC Radio 4, Vicky Featherstone, then the artistic director of the Royal Court, said there had certainly been “concerns” and “stories” about Spacey during his Old Vic tenure.

Within days, Netflix cut ties with Spacey and began engineering his exit from House of Cards, which would only run for one further season, after the “mysterious” death of Underwood they teased at the end of season five. (In 2022, a judge would order Spacey to pay $31m to the show’s production company for the losses incurred in removing him, a decision the actor unsuccessfully appealed.)

Meanwhile, a flurry of further accusers came forward. A former TV news anchor claimed that Spacey had grabbed the genitals of her 18-year-old son at a Nantucket bar in 2016, after plying him with drinks. A filmmaker named Tony Montana related a similar story on ABC News of being groped by Spacey in 2003.

Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening in a scene from the movie American Beauty.

An investigation was launched at the Old Vic, which initially denied any complaints being made against him during his tenure. The theatre commissioned an outside law firm to gather personal testimonies from colleagues, and 20 instances of “inappropriate behaviour” were found. Spacey did not comment on these allegations.

That summer, Spacey had shot his role as the 81-year-old billionaire J. Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s true-crime kidnapping drama All the Money in the World. The planned release was timed for an awards campaign centring on Spacey, which had to be rethought drastically because of his sudden ignominy.

The film’s premiere at AFI Fest that November was scrapped at the last minute, and Spacey became the first actor so profoundly cancelled as to have an entire performance replaced. A much more age-appropriate Christopher Plummer (then 88) was recast in the nick of time for reshoots and would reap the Best Supporting Actor nomination that Spacey was meant to get.

Further to this, Spacey had just completed his most substantial film role in years – that of Gore Vidal in the Netflix-produced biopic Gore. With consideration certainly given to the film’s explicit gay sex, the decision was made to bury it, and six years later it has still yet to see the light of day. Meanwhile, many actors who had previously worked with Spacey broke their silence. Guy Pearce, his co-star in LA Confidential, described him as “handsy” on set (”thankfully I was 29 and not 14″).

The disgrace already felt comprehensive, regardless of Spacey’s strenuous denials and ongoing legal battles. He vanished for a year, only to resurface with a notorious Christmas video posted on the internet in December 2018, and then two more in 2019 and 2020. In these, he spoke directly to the camera in the guise of Underwood, extending goodwill to his faithful fans and threatening – which is exactly the right word – a comeback once the dust had settled. “We’re not done no matter what anyone says,” he barked. Everyone simply thought he’d lost his mind, or dispensed with any PR agency worth their salt. Treating his new-found notoriety as some kind of perverse game was no way to shake it off.

As the Anthony Rapp case prepared to go to a civil trial, Spacey had to contend with a fresh onslaught of charges in the UK – the criminal ones he has just been contesting at Southwark Crown Court. These resulted in 12 counts, including three of indecent assault and seven of sexual assault, which he was accused of perpetrating against four different men in the UK, between 2001 and 2013.

Spacey pleaded not guilty to the lot and repeatedly challenged the motives of his accusers in the four-week trial, which saw him take the stand for several consecutive days. His arrivals and departures in front of waiting press saw him smiling imperturbably: in place of black-tie interviews on red carpets, he’s now a more familiar sight in a suit, bustling down stretches of London pavement before ducking into cars.

In the courtroom, he was described as wiping away tears during statements from character witnesses who knew him well at the Old Vic; he also grew testy under cross-examination from the prosecutor, Christine Agnew, and accused her of “making stuff up”. In response to her claim that he’s a “sexual bully” who “delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable”, he retorted that he “did not have a power wand that I waved in front of people’s faces to make them go to bed”.

The trial peaked, arguably, with the evidence of Elton John and David Furnish, via video link from Monaco. They were called by the defence to affirm which year Spacey had attended their annual White Tie and Tiara Ball in Windsor and specified that he had flown in by private jet in 2001, wearing a white tie. They remember no subsequent visits, which contradicted the assertion of one of Spacey’s accusers that he was driving Spacey there, in either 2004 or 2005, when the actor grabbed his crotch and nearly forced him off the road.

Calling in these witnesses may also have been part of an underlying strategy from the defence to have gay A-Listers rallying to Spacey’s cause, and potentially impress the jury with a narrative of victimisation. “The celebrity factor can have an overpowering impact, subliminally,” said Mark Borkowski, a crisis PR consultant and author. “Elton John was quite a star witness for him.”

Spacey’s acquittal in Southwark means that so far none of the allegations have been proven.

Actor Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of sexual assault. Photo / Getty Images

In the $40m suit launched against him by Rapp, Spacey was found not liable in October last year for assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Recanting his earlier apology, which he called the consequence of bad advice, Spacey successfully fended off the case with arguments that Rapp was motivated by professional jealousy. The burden of proof was on Rapp, for an encounter 36 years ago, and the evidence wasn’t strong enough.

Again, when it came to the London criminal court proceedings, the jury was unconvinced by the claims made against Spacey.

Spacey said in an interview with a German newspaper last month that there are people “who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared”.

In the summer of 2021, he shot the small, dubbed role of a police detective in an Italian drama, The Man Who Drew God, directed by Franco Nero, and co-starring Faye Dunaway. It got a minimal release in Italian cinemas and went to Russian video-on-demand, but hardly sowed the seeds of a mighty comeback.

Peter Five Eight, a dark, comic thriller, which was filmed in 2021, is due to be released in the US in August; there is no UK release date. Control, a British independent film, in which only Spacey’s voice is heard, is also set to be released this year.

“There’s work and there’s work,” argues an anonymous film director I spoke to about Spacey’s professional prospects after this trial. “I’m sure people will hire him, but these are likely to be very under-the-radar projects. Even though the trial has gone nowhere, I don’t think the industry will let him back in, in any meaningful way. Especially in the current climate.”

The verdict is irrelevant, is the opinion of Benedict. “There’s an esprit de corps necessary to work alongside ensembles of cast and crew, in film or theatre. In Spacey’s case, that’s been poisoned.”

Janice Min of the “Ankler”, the leading film industry newsletter, concurs. “Even if the verdict is in his favour, his chances of a comeback are slight at best in mainstream Hollywood. The drama and press around any roles would be too challenging for any big studio or streamer and just aren’t worth the hassle. He would sink any marketing campaign that wants to focus the project, and I really doubt any co-stars would sign on with him. He will remain persona non grata because, regardless of the trial outcome, the cloud of bad behaviour still hangs over him.”

The number of Spacey’s accusers makes it a quite different case from Johnny Depp’s – in which only one person tarred him as an abuser – and correspondingly diminishes Spacey’s chances of a comeback. Even with no ensuing criminal conviction from the UK trial, the view of some is that Kevin Spacey, the one-time King of Hollywood, is unlikely to get his crown back.