"TOUCH OF EVIL"

By Steven Daly

On a balmy evening in Santa Monica, California a black dog named Legacy romps amid the detritus of what is apparently a movie project of several months' standing. The animal belongs to Kevin Spacey, who distractedly plays with it before he re-enters a small room packed with digital editing equipment. At Spacey's behest, his editor efficiently clips a syllable of Joe Mantegna's cop-talk; then he allows Matt Dillon to glare for just half a second longer at Faye Dunaway's weary barkeep. These are the final, painstaking stages of editing for Albino Alligator, a $6 million siege drama that marks this low-key actor's debut as director.

"In a quiet way I put it out there that I wanted to take this step," Spacey says of his new vocation. "Then my agent phoned me one day and said, `You have an offer to direct a movie called Albino Alligator' and I said, `No. Kevin *Costner's* number is...You've got the wrong Kevin." This may be a little disingenuous on Spacey's part, since directing this script by 26-year-old Christian Forte (son of Fifties pop idol Fabian) is clearly a pay-off for the acclaim that's been coming his way for some time now.

No one is telling people to like Kevin Spacey - but mention his name to most sentient moviegoers and their eyes will light up with recognition that he is *the* character actor of the moment. Dazed audiences stumbled out of The Usual Suspects with many questions on their minds (like "What the fuck happened?"), and among them was: "Who the hell was the guy with the limp and what else has he been in?" As "Verbal" Kint, this boyishly debauched 36-year-old established a buzz quite disproportionate to his modest media presence. (All the more impressive when you realize that a big-name star was lobbying furiously for his role.) Kint, the crippled crux of this intricate crime saga, was one off the most insidious creeps of recent cinema history, and confirmed that in Spacey we have a magnetic modern anti-hero worthy of filing next to Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper.

The still-labeled Cerruti jacket on Spacey's back is a clue that Hollywood has officially recognized this fact: his recent Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor has made Spacey a desirable mannequin for any number of fashion houses. For Spacey's part, the Oscar nod (which follows two other critics' awards) taps into an ambivalence about the film industry that's never far from his mind. "I think we all have a love-hate relationship with these kind of awards ceremonies," Spacey enunciates with the confidence of a stage-trained actor who knows exactly what he wants. "When I was at Cannes last year for Usual Suspects there was a part of me that thought, `Wow, this is amazing' - you're walking up this red carpet and the paparazzi are shouting your name and we're showing a movie that we really believe in and it's kind of beautiful and wonderful. And then there's another part of you that's looking around at all of the horseshit and all of the sycophants and the people who are selling the worst kind of product, and which knows the whole thing is horrible."

Spacey's ascent to awards-show fodder has not itself been pretty: gimps, wimps, and gimlet-eyed thugs decorate his CV like so much dandruff. On the passive end of the scale is his role in the underrated The Ref as a suburban husband whose sexual shortcomings are dragged out for public consumption when he and his harridan wife (Judy Davis) are taken hostage by a burglar (Dennis Leary). On the aggressive side, there's the eloquent serial killer who so successfully got inside Brad Pitt's empty little head in Seven. However diverse Spacey's movies, he makes every part crackle with malevolent wit; and each one is a variation on a favourite theme. "We are extraordinarily skilled as human beings to justify almost anything that we find ourselves doing, and that is interesting to me," says Spacey. "Look at the great stories, mysteries, tragedies, from Shakespeare right up to Nixon. They're all about ambition, people seeking power - whether it's political or emotional - and what happens to them. And of course, this is a business that is fraught with those kind of landmines."

In Spacey's new movie Swimming With Sharks he doesn't just walk across those landmines, he tap dances on them. In Hollywood executive Buddy Ackerman, Spacey has conjured up yet another memorable big-screen villain, this one an Armani-clad smoothy who makes a hobby out of meticulously terrorizing his employees. The film, originally titled The Buddy Factor, tracks the relationship between Ackerman and his new assistant (Frank Whaley), lingering over the lad's humiliation by, and ultimate obsession with, his boss. Shot in 18 days, it's a modest picture that's more notable for Whaley's modulated performance than for Spacey's turn, which, although sadistically enjoyable, is surely the kind of thing he could fax in at this point.

If Kevin Spacey had anything personal to draw on for his rogues' gallery of characters, it might just have been his younger self. As a teenager growing up in LA's San Fernando Valley he was dispatched by his middle-class parents to Northridge Military Academy in the hope this would solve his behavioral problems. He had been, he says, "a really bad kid. I got in a lot of fights, I burned things down, I was a regular Beavis and Butthead." Not that Spacey lasted long at that establishment - he was expelled for throwing a tire at a fellow student.

It wasn't until the 17-year-old Spacey saw singer actress Mare Winningham perform in a high school play that the errant lad decided to straighten up. He transferred to Winningham's high school, Chatsworth, and, to everyone's relief, redirected his energy into endeavors dramatic. The former pyromaniac was soon putting his mind towards a career in showbiz, launching himself as a stand-up comic with a sideline of impressions. (Carey Grant, James Stewart, and Johnny Carson were among Spacey's repertoire - "Well, it was 1978," he dryly notes.) At the urging of fellow Chatsworth graduate Val Kilmer, he successfully auditioned for East Coast acting school Juilliard, but dropped out after two years and began to single-mindedly accumulate stage experience. "When I was 25 years old I was running around like a fucking chicken with my head cut off trying to `make it' in 30 seconds," he recalls. "Luckily I had some pretty good people around me who basically said, `What are you in such a hurry for?' And I think that was the point in my life that I decided I would just stop and try to build a foundation of work. And maybe *hope* that by my thirties I'd be getting opportunities."

Spacey was able to create those opportunities with an impressive series of roles that began with a 1986 run opposite Jack Lemmon in "Long Day's Journey Into Night" at London's Haymarket Theater. Spacey next used a stint in the TV cop drama Wiseguy to show that he could carve his nameon the public consciousness. Thanks to the network's low regard for the show, his character Mel Profitt was allowed to indulge in the type of behaviour never since seen on prime time, a repertoire that went from
delusional rage to sex with his sister. Returning to the New York stage, Spacey showed impressive muscle as the hard-man spiv in "Lost in Yonkers," a darker-than-usual piece by Broadway seat-filler Neil Simon. The role paid off twofold: Spacey won a coveted Tony Award, and he was picked out by Al Pacino for the movie adaptation of "Glengarry Glen Ross," David Mamet's saga of real-estate venality. Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris, Jonathan Pryce and Spacey's mentor Jack Lemmon were just a few of the names lining up to chew the scenery, but although Spacey professes to being "terrified of being found out," he more than held his own. Finally he was, as a Mamet character might have it, running with the big dogs.

Kevin Spacey determinedly yanks a backwards tweed cap down on his forehead before he gets into his rented grey Volvo outside the editing suite. As he drives to the hotel he's crashing at while Albino Alligator is being completed for Cannes submission, there is about Spacey, an air of mild irascibility, a seriousness that's dampening his usual sardonic humor. At least, you might think, Spacey will soon be able to cut loose and use his Oscar nomination to trade up to seven-figure salaries and leading-man status; take revenge on an industry whose repeated hesitance to cast him extended even to the film for which he earned his Oscar nomination. Well, you'd be wrong. "The most important thing is to not buy into it because that to me is capitalizing on current hype, and that's when you lose your credibility," he says. "I have no interest in running out there and doing the next big thing. I've tried very hard not to put myself in a position where I'm beholden to the next bone that's being thrown, to make decisions based on the quality of the work, not from necessity.

"My idea of credibility is primarily self-imposed," continues Spacey, as he sips white wine in the hotel bar, and lights his last cigarette. "And it all relates to the thing that I've been interested in as an actor and a director, which is what can you live with, what are you *willing* to live with as a human being. And there's things I'm just not willing to live with - and I won't. And if it means that I stop and find something else in life that interests me or challenges me, so be it. Because that's when you should stop; you should not continue if every day you don't get out of bed going `I've *got* to go and do this.' If you're getting out of bed and going, `Oh fuck. I really would rather sit around my kidney-shaped swimming pool and smoke cigarettes,' then you're really in trouble."

All of which might make Spacey sound like just another would-be iconoclast in a town full of rebels with personal trainers - if he didn't have the mileage and the talent to back it up. That, plus a couple of commodities that are getting rarer by the season: the willingness to be hated on-screen and the conviction to just say no to lucrative jobs. "There's a number of things that I've been offered throughout the years that could have made me an enormous amount of money. I mean, an *absurd* amount of money," he adds, pausing as if to envision those mountains of $100 bills. "It would be in bad taste to name names, but every season I'm offered five or six pilots for series - and television
money is a lot of money with these five-or seven-year contracts. And I turn them down. There's also a lot of movies that I just couldn't see myself being part of, so I pass on them, too. And I've never been wrong, I've never regretted turning anything down."

With no movie roles presently lined up - he has already completed Al Pacino's Shakespeare documentary Looking For Richard and the latest John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill - Spacey is planning a return to the stage once his Albino Alligator duties have been discharged. He may tread the boards in a revival of "National Anthems," a working-class tale written by his late friend Dennis Macintyre, or it may be something more unusual. Something truly out of leftfield: yes, American cinema's new Prince of Darkness wants to do a Broadway musical. It could be a revival of the little-known original version of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," but rest assured it will not be "some sappy musical. The genre interests me because - how do I say this delicately - actors like me don't usually do them. And I think that would be interesting. There might be a dimension to the musical experience that would be fun for me to do and fun for the audience." Spacey pauses, his musings over for today. He flashes a menacing smile. "Now, how can I get some fucking smokes in this joint?"

Quelle: The Face, April, 1996