Kevin Spacey interview: 'Let the hump do the acting’

Kevin Spacey tells Sarah Crompton about leaving the Old Vic, and how a famous friend advised him to tackle Richard III.

By Sarah Crompton 25 June 2011 • 7:11pm

In a light blue pullover and loose white polo shirt, Kevin Spacey looks more like an all-American athlete than a Shakespearean actor preparing to play the conniving hunchback in Richard III. Since February, he says, he has “stopped drinking, stopped smoking, stopped everything and started training because when I talked to actors who had played Richard every single one of them said: 'Be careful. I threw my back out, screwed up my knee, my ankle.’” He laughs, then quotes the advice that fellow actor Simon Russell Beale passed on to him. “If you have a hump, let the hump do the acting.”

Spacey is talking in his small, neat office, upstairs at the Old Vic theatre in London, immediately after a third complete run-through of the play in rehearsal. He feels, he says, as if he has begun to understand “the ask” of the play, what it will require from him. He learnt the part before rehearsals started “though there is a difference between knowing something by mind and knowing something by heart. I am now beginning to know it by heart.”

The role of Shakespeare’s charismatic dictator is significant to him in many ways. It is, for one thing, the part that people have been clamouring to see him play ever since he took over the artistic directorship of the Old Vic in 2004. For another, it reunites him with Sam Mendes, who last directed him in American Beauty, the 1999 film that brought them both Oscars.

The 10 months that Richard III will be touring around the world (in a run that lasts until March 2012) also marks the culmination of the Bridge Project, the transatlantic theatre venture with Spacey as producer and Mendes as director, that, in Spacey’s pungent turn of phrase, brought British and American actors together to perform the classics in their own voices and styles and “disprove the myth that it would be s---”.

Mendes’s productions, particularly of Uncle Vanya, A Winter’s Tale and As You Like It, have been one of the glories of Spacey’s tenure at the Old Vic. But generally this is a rosy time on the South Bank, a far cry from his early days in charge when critics were baying for his blood over a series of spectacular flops, followed by the popular but controversial casting of Sir Ian McKellen as a pantomime dame.

The difficulties of those months clearly still rankle. Spacey is insistent that “no one should ever feel sorry for me. I’ve been treated very well for the most part.” But there is a toughness in his voice when he talks about the “cynicism and dismissive, derisive comments” he encountered.

He says he always had a 10-year plan for the theatre. “When I had to think about how to get a new audience, a younger audience, a more diverse audience, one that has never been to the Old Vic and one that lives in this neighbourhood, I didn’t think I could start with the classics because that was appealing to an already theatre-going audience.”

His idea was, he says, to break the mould with bold strokes. This does not entirely explain how he managed to begin his tenure with a staggeringly unfunny Dutch comedy, Cloaca, though he can possibly be forgiven for bringing in Robert Altman to direct Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues – even if that also resulted in disaster. But Spacey has been as good as his word. He has brought a different audience into the Old Vic, which now plays to an average 75 per cent capacity, high for a theatre outside the West End.

And in the process, he says, he has transformed his life. “It’s a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition,” he says. “I did that for a while and I did that quite successfully. And then I took the blinders off and I decided I wanted to work on behalf of something outside of myself, bigger than myself.

“It’s changed me. The work I have done here has made me a better actor and I have also learnt a great deal about business, about finance, about fund-raising. I’ve learnt how to make the arguments successfully to run a major British institution with no public subsidy whatsoever.”

But his ability to raise money for his own theatre doesn’t blind Spacey to the need for public subsidy of the arts in general. “I recognise that my position allows me to call someone who might be a wealthy potential patron. But not every theatre or arts institution that is going to be hurt by the cuts has an actor who’s well-known from movies to represent them.”

He recently gave a speech in the United States, lobbying Congress to vote for more money for the arts. “One of the arguments I make is: look at the South Bank and pick any time during the week and it’s teeming with people in the shops and restaurants; and now imagine: would it be the same without Tate Modern, or the Globe, or the National Theatre, the BFI, the Festival Hall, the Young Vic, the Old Vic? Why are people coming? They are coming for the culture. And that is a hugely strong economic argument as well as just a cultural argument, so it is an argument worth making.”

The achievements of which he is proudest, he says, are those which involve education and community work, and he plans to continue that through the Kevin Spacey Foundation, which he will launch as part of the Richard III tour. But he is determined to leave the Old Vic in 2015 – after 11 years in charge, and an association of some 18 years. “I’m ready to leave, I don’t want to run a building any more,” he says. “And a theatre needs new artistic blood.”

Leaving will give him a chance to return more wholeheartedly to film. When I ask whether his film career has suffered because he has been so busy in London, he pauses for a long time before answering. “I suppose there is an attitude that if you are out of sight, you’re out of mind,” he says at last, “and I’ve certainly been out of sight.

“But I also made a choice.” He suddenly leans forward and speaks with emphasis. “I think you have to understand the way I am in order to understand that I don’t miss things. I love what I do. I don’t pine for something else.

“I think it is just a function of the fact that I moved around so much as a child that I learnt early on to make every place my home.”

He is referring to how his father’s irregular job prospects as a technical writer led the Fowler family – Spacey is his professional name – to move around the US before settling in California, where Spacey began to act in high school. His big break came on stage, as the young Jamie Tyrone, opposite Jack Lemmon, in Jonathan Miller’s production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

But after that it was film that absorbed him, with American Beauty winning him his best-actor Oscar, to go with the best-supporting trophy he’d picked up for The Usual Suspects, four years earlier. Though his film career has been on the back burner, he has continued to work and has three movies about to be released: Casino Jack, in which he plays a disgraced Washington lobbyist, Margin Call, a thriller set during the financial crisis, and Horrible Bosses, a black comedy. He was also the executive producer of The Social Network, though he credits his producing partner Dana Brunetti with seeing the potential of the project and bringing it to the screen, and is full of praise for the script of Aaron Sorkin, and the direction of David Fincher.

“We fall into a pretty illustrious line-up of movies that everyone thinks won the Oscar and didn’t – Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, Network,” he says. His next project, post Richard III, will also be with Fincher, in the shape of an American version of Michael Dobbs’s House of Cards.

But in the meantime, it is Shakespeare’s king who absorbs his attention, in a production that carries fresh relevance in the light of the Arab spring.

“It’s interesting looking at these dictators round the world,” says Spacey, “[and seeing] how their idea of what a king looks like is very much based on English monarchy.”

For all his worries about being stretched by the vastness of the part, there is no disguising the relish with which he is approaching it. “The big difference between movies and the theatre is that theatre is this living, breathing organism that every day shifts and changes,” he says.

“No matter how good you might be in a movie, you’ll never be any better. But in theatre you have a chance to be better tomorrow night, or in two weeks’ time. It is quite incredible.”