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Can Kevin Spacey’s celebrity mates help un-cancel him?

As the two-time Academy Award-winning actor’s peers, including Stephen Fry and Sharon Stone, write letters of support for the disgraced ‘Usual Suspects’ star, Nick Hilton asks: is it possible to come back from cancellation?

Friday 17 May 2024 10:23 EDT
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Kevin Spacey has spent the past seven years in a form of professional purgatory following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct
Kevin Spacey has spent the past seven years in a form of professional purgatory following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

There are many signs that your career as an actor is on the rocks. You stop getting auditions, perhaps, or invites to swanky after-show parties. Maybe people keep gawping at you in public but don’t ask for selfies any more, because they don’t necessarily want to be seen in a photograph with you. And then there’s the final indignity: when a ragtag group of your peers write letters of support to the Telegraph, asking for you to be given something to do with your life.

That was the fate this week of Kevin Spacey, the two-time Academy Award-winning actor who has spent the past seven years in a form of professional purgatory, following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct. The actor who, in 2017, had been about to star as J Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, suddenly found himself without a friend in the industry. But the week after a series of fresh allegations – which the actor has denounced, saying he “will not take responsibility or apologise to anyone who’s made up stuff about me or exaggerated stories about me” – were made in the Channel 4 two-parter Spacey Unmasked, it seems his banishment is ending.

“To continue to harass and hound him, to devote a whole documentary to accusations that simply do not add up to crimes,” wrote Stephen Fry. “How can that be considered proportionate and justified?” It was a sentiment echoed by others. “I can’t wait to see Kevin back at work,” said Sharon Stone. “Personally speaking,” wrote Liam Neeson, “our industry needs him and misses him greatly.” It is notable, possibly, that none of these actors have ever actually starred alongside Spacey.

The (to me, somewhat disingenuous) claim seems to be that Spacey has been disinvited from Hollywood’s elite and forcibly prevented from plying his trade. “Surely it is time for this man to be forgiven for whatever poor judgements he may have made in the past,” wrote Sir Trevor Nunn, who has directed Spacey in two productions at the Old Vic in London, where Spacey was a longstanding artistic director, “and allowed to resume his career, after seven years of exile?”

Kevin Spacey will not be able to “resume” his career as though nothing has happened. His image, as a clean-cut member of the acting craft’s upper echelons, is irreparably tarnished. When he was cleared of all charges at Southwark Crown Court (in a case brought by the CPS for allegations made on British soil, which does not cover the totality of the accusations made against him) he was found not guilty of criminality. Yet he has, by his own admission, and that of those around him, been guilty of inappropriate, lascivious behaviour. The legal bar for sexual assault is notoriously high; the bar for being thought of as a creep is far lower.

Yet Spacey has not actually been prevented from working. His public appearances have been sporadic and weird – self-published videos in character as Frank Underwood from House of Cards, or singing “La Bamba” with street revellers in Seville – but he has not been imprisoned or stripped of any work visas. In fact, during the “exile”, to which Nunn refers, Spacey has appeared in five movies and received the Stella della Mole award, a lifetime achievement gong from the National Museum of Cinema in Italy. Does that really sound like an “exile”?

Of course, on another level, it’s clearly true that Spacey is being prevented from working. He is not being cast in acting roles on film or TV, or even on the stage, because the arts community is still undergoing a reckoning from the MeToo movement, not to mention a liability crisis for productions and contracts scuppered by personal misdemeanours. There are few businesses quite as capitalistic as the movie business, and, right now, Spacey is too big a risk to the shareholders.

In recent months we’ve seen the impact that failures of due diligence can have on some of the biggest media companies in the world. Marvel, for example, is dealing with the fallout from Jonathan Majors, due to star as Kang in an upcoming Avengers film, being convicted of assault against a former partner. With journalists unearthing new accusations against Spacey on a regular basis, it is hard to believe any major studio will take a punt on a person of such beleaguered reputation.

Where the courts go one way, the market goes another. What remains to be seen is whether Spacey can carve himself room in the current niche for anti-woke performers. The encouragement of Fry, Stone and Neeson – none of whom is likely to headline a tentpole movie in 2024 – will be a slim solace.

What remains to be seen is whether Spacey can, like Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, continue his career in the less critical spaces of continental Europe, or whether, like Laurence Fox (who has not faced similar accusations, but has similarly become persona non grata) his acting career is effectively ended.

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