INTERVIEW: KEVIN SPACEY ON HITTING JACKPOT, ABANDONING WINNINGS

Saturday, December 25, 2010

INTERVIEW: KEVIN SPACEY ON HITTING JACKPOT, ABANDONING WINNINGS

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend about 20 minutes at the Loews Regency Hotel in New York with one of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey, who had just flown in from London to do a few interviews about and attend a special screening of the new film “Casino Jack” (ATO Pictures, 12/17, R, trailer), a dramedy directed by the late George Hickenlooper in which he portrays the disgraced Washington, D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and for which he recently received a Golden Globe nod — the sixth of his career — for best actor (musical or comedy). Spacey was clearly exhausted and under the weather after his travels (he sipped on a bowl of matzo ball soup throughout our time together), but he still managed to give me a wonderful interview about his remarkable life and career, and for that I am very grateful.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO AUDIO OF OUR CONVERSATION!

Over the course of our conversation, Spacey and I discussed…

his early moviegoing experiences/favorites (he loved old movies and admired the likes of Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy — “people who seemed to do extraordinary work and also had what seemed to be like careers that went on for like, you know, eight fucking decades,” and who “were also theater actors, and continually came back to the theater”)
his discovery that he wanted to be an actor (when he was just eight-years-old), his realization that he was an actor (during high school, when he did some stand-up comedy), and his first steps into serious acting (Val Kilmer, who was two years ahead of him in high school, urged him to come out to New York to try his luck, and it was there that he was accepted to Juilliard and later dropped out in order participate in a production of Shakespeare in the Park and take his first steps onto Broadway, where Mike Nichols ultimately took him under his wing)
his transition into film, which began with a small role in Nichols’s film “Heartburn” (1986) and was given a huge boost by a principal role in James Foley’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992) opposite the likes of Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, and Jack Lemmon (the last of whom would become a close friend and mentor), as well as the support of producer Alan J. Pakula, who fought for him to appear in a principal role in his movie “Consenting Adults” (1992)
his remarkable four-year run from 1995 through 1999 — during which he starred in “The Usual Suspects” (1995), “Se7en” (1995), “L.A. Confidential” (1997), and “American Beauty” (1999), winning a best supporting actor Oscar for the first and a best actor Oscar for the last (making him one of only 14 male actors who have won more than one Oscar, the others being Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Daniel Day-Lewis, Robert De Niro, Gene Hackman, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, Fredric March, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Spencer Tracy, and Denzel Washington) — and his somewhat surprising decision to leave Hollywood for London shortly thereafter to become the artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre Company (“I’ve sort of spent my life making decisions like that, where I was supposed to do this but I decided to do that… I just didn’t want to spend another 10 years doing the same thing — staying on the lists, and are you hot, and are you making money, and are you on the thing, and are you one of the guys — it was just like, I’ve done it… It was the best decision I ever made”)
his decision to come back to the United States to play Abramoff in “Casino Jack,” his first leading role in years (Hickenlooper wrote in a Facebook post that he’d love Spacey for the part, and when word of that got back to Spacey he got in touch with him; “we had an immediate connection, a mutual affection and frustration with American politics, and found this particular story fascinating”; they wound up meeting with Abramoff at the prison where he was incarcerated at the time; Spacey’s research subsequently turned up many contradictory things about the man, leaving him with the ultimate goal of “humanizing somebody who has been hugely dehumanized”)
his and his creative partner Dana Brunetti’s Trigger Street Productions, which was one of the production companies responsible for “The Social Network” (he jokes, “My favorite thing about ‘The Social Network’ is that I’m not in it”), a film on which Brunetti served as a producer and Spacey as an executive producer (“10 years ago Dana Brunetti came to the Academy Awards as my assistant, and this year he might well be going as an Oscar-nominated producer, and that’s a pretty good story”)