He Asked to Vanish from the Poster. The Second Time, Hollywood Did It for Him

Fridman opens on John Doe, calling the Se7en performance one of the greatest portrayals of a murderer on screen. Spacey’s first correction is that he did not get the part. In late November 1994 he auditioned for David Fincher, went back to New York, and the production started around December 12 without him. On December 23, at about seven in the evening, with his mother visiting his West 12th Street apartment, producer Arnold Kopelson called: they had hired someone, Fincher had fired him the day before, and Fincher wanted Spacey on a plane Sunday to start shooting Tuesday.

He asked them to send the script again. That night he had a feeling he still cannot quite describe: it would be better if he took no billing. By the time Se7en opened it would be the last of four films he had just shot. If any of those broke through, a poster reading Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey—with Spacey missing for the first twenty-five to forty minutes—would tell the audience who the killer was. New Line Cinema told him, in his telling, to go fuck himself: they had the right to his picture. The argument lasted about twenty-four hours. Fincher said he thought it was a really cool idea. The compromise was first credit when the end titles start.

Sunday he flew to Los Angeles and walked into the makeup room. He had just cut his hair short for Outbreak, playing military. He asked the hairdresser for a razor. Fincher said, are you kidding? Spacey said no. Fincher said if you shave your head, I’ll shave mine. They both did, and he started shooting the next day. The long answer to how he became John Doe is that he did not have much time to build the character. What Fincher did, he says, was set the audience up to meet him.

The last stretch of Se7en—the car in the desert under the electrical wires, then the box—is the scene Fridman calls one of the greatest in film history. Five murders have already made John Doe almost inhuman; when he finally sits in the back seat he is quiet. Spacey remembers Fincher saying, over and over, “Less, do less,” and reminding him that he is in control, that he is going to win, and that knowing that should give him tremendous confidence. The style of the film had already built the terror. Spacey’s job was to “just say the words and mean them.” Tragedy, he adds, is often people operating without enough information: Romeo and Juliet do not know what the audience knows. Whether Pitt’s character shoots Doe or himself was discussed; nothing ties up in a nice bow.

“Mean them,” for Fincher, can mean “I don’t believe a thing that is coming out of your mouth. Shall we try it again?” Sometimes there is no note at all, only “let’s do it again.” Spacey says, with humility, that Fincher is literally trying to beat the acting out of you—shredding pretense, props, the bit with the can. He wants people to talk as they do in life: no big dramatic pauses. Actors did not always love those pauses; watch Preston Sturges, he says, and people talk at incredible speed, and things are funnier that fast. Styles changed in the late fifties and sixties toward “feeling it.” Fincher wants pace, timing, movement, clarity, speed, because that is how you keep an audience engaged.

He tells Jack Lemmon’s story from Lemmon’s first film, It Should Happen to You, directed by George Cukor. First take, first day, a terrific scene. Cukor asks for a little less. Second take, Lemmon thinks they can go home. Cukor asks for a little less again. Third time, Lemmon says if he does any less he will not be acting. Cukor says, “Exactly, Jack, exactly.” That is the smile in the desert car: the tiny turn of the head, “Oh, you didn’t know,” a glimmer that is hard to get to because Pitt, across from him, is going through a mental breakdown. The work was also not reacting to the power of what Pitt was throwing. Fincher’s take count is famous—Spacey confirms averages of twenty-five to sixty-five against most directors’ fewer than ten. Sometimes it is a stopwatch: take a minute off this scene.

Fincher once distinguished Spacey’s skill as an actor—dramatizing a text—from his skill as a performer, the seduction of an audience. Spacey hears “performer” as entertainment, comedy, winning people over. His own job, as he has looked at it, is to serve the writing. If he does, he serves himself: right world, right context, right style. “It’s not my painting, it’s someone else’s painting. I’m a series of colors in someone else’s painting.” The barometer is when strangers stop him and talk about a character by name as if the person existed. Fridman admits the problem of the interview: remembering that the man across from him is Kevin, not Frank or John.

When he first reads a script and is devastated by it—beautiful, life-affirming, or terrifying—he wants the audience to have that first-read experience, which means working backwards. He once could not crack a last scene. He called director John Swanbeck, later the director of The Big Kahuna. Swanbeck asked what the last line was before he falls over and falls asleep. “That last drink, the old KO.” Think about what that means, then work backwards. Days later Spacey saw it: KO is knockout, the only boxing term in the play, and the playwright had written the eighth round between two brothers, physical and emotional. They staged the scene that way. The audience never knew. What he loved was being told to ask a question he had not thought of asking yet.

Improvisation, he says, lives in two contexts. In the rehearsal room it is a device. Sam Mendes brings rugs, chairs, sofas, and has actors play a scene far apart, then closer, to see where the scene goes if you do not make that choice, or if you say something else. That is how you learn limits that are not on the page. Shakespeare is harder to improv. The other context is making it fresh, which is theater. Sports keep the same rules; every match is a different game. Same lines, maybe similar blocking; what changes is attack, intention, how you and the other actors grow, and how tonight’s audience reacts. Week one to week twelve of a play is extraordinary. In a movie, however good you are, you will never be any better. It is frozen. Tomorrow night on stage can be better than tonight.

There is also no safety net. Fuck it up, everyone sees. Start giggling, everyone sees that too, and Spacey is “very guilty” of corpsing. Judi Dench is worse: they had to bring the curtain down on her and Maggie Smith because they could not continue. He has laughed through speeches because fellow actors were putting carrots up their noses or broccoli in their ears. A company becomes a family in a way film days do not: the whole group is in the room every day. Six months later he still wakes up and finally knows how to play a scene. He does not think film acting and theater acting are different arts so much as different stamina. Theater is athletic, seven performances a week, voice intact. On camera, your front row is also your back row; you do not have to do so much. Good acting is good acting. His first Equalizer episode, he says, is horrible, because he did not yet know himself on film.

He is a believer in doing the words the writer wrote. Improv in comedy he loves; in plays he has used it less. In film it can be terrifying. In Glengarry Glen Ross his character has just screwed something up, and Al Pacino is livid. Camera moving with Pacino, mid-take, Pacino starts talking about Spacey: you don’t think we know how you got this job, whose dick you’ve been sucking to get this part. Spacey did not know what was happening, but he was reacting. After the take Pacino walked up: that was so good; I asked sound not to record you, so you have no dialogue, only me; you look like a car wreck. It was, Spacey says, an incredibly generous gift so that he would actually react. That take is the close-up in the movie.

Pacino is why he got the film, not Jack Lemmon, though people assume otherwise. Spacey was on Broadway in Lost in Yonkers, playing a gangster, sharing a dresser, Laura Beatty, with Pacino. She told Pacino to see the play. Three days later came an audition for James Foley’s Glengarry. Before he quite had the part they asked him to a Saturday read-through at Pacino’s office; Jack Lemmon was flying in. Spacey asked them not to tell Mr. Lemmon he would be there. He walked in on Lemmon doing the New York Times crossword. Lemmon looked up: “Is it possible you could get a job without me? I’m so tired of holding up your end of it.” The ensemble—Pacino, Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Jonathan Pryce—was one of the great casts. By then they had already done Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Murder of Mary Phagan, and Dad. This was the fourth time. Lemmon had become his father figure.

He first met Lemmon in December 1974. His junior-high drama class went to a “How to Audition” workshop at a time when Lemmon was at the Mark Taper Forum in Juno and the Paycock with Walter Matthau and Maureen Stapleton. Thirteen-year-old Spacey did a monologue. Lemmon put a hand on his shoulder and said it was terrific—everything Lemmon had been talking about, the kid had just done. When you finish high school, Lemmon said, you should go to New York and study to be an actor, because this is what you are meant to do with your life. Twelve years later Spacey read in the New York Times that Lemmon was coming to Broadway in Long Day’s Journey Into Night and decided he would play Jamie. Casting did not want to see him: Jonathan Miller wanted movie actors for the sons.

Spacey learned Miller was lecturing at Alice Tully Hall, sat next to an elderly woman who fell asleep with a cocktail-reception invitation sticking out of her handbag, took it, and walked in. He told Miller that Eugene O’Neill had brought him. Miller wrote down his hotel and said the casting directors on this one were taking his messages; auditions started Thursday. After four scenes Miller said that unless someone else blew him against the wall, Spacey pretty much had the part—but he had to come back and read with Mr. Lemmon. In August 1985, at 890 Broadway, they did four scenes. Spacey was relentless, toppling over him. Lemmon put a hand on his shoulder again: “That was a touch of terrific. I never thought we’d find the rotten kid.” He spent the next year of his life with that man. They used to joke that if every contract came with a Jack Lemmon clause, it would be a more beautiful world.

What made Lemmon so good? Spacey thinks he set out to do what his father said on his deathbed. The elder Lemmon was the “Donut King” in Boston, not in show business at all. Last words: “Go out there and spread a little sunshine.” That, Spacey thinks, is what Jack loved to do. When Spacey later won the Oscar for American Beauty, he thanked Lemmon from the stage, then sat down to wait and see if Mendes would win. His phone rang. Lemmon: “You’re a son of a bitch.” Congratulations, thanks for thanking me, God knows you couldn’t have done it without me—and do you know how long it took me to go from supporting actor for Mister Roberts to a second Oscar? Ten, twelve years. You did it in four, you son of a bitch.

Sam Mendes had never directed a film before American Beauty. He rehearsed it like a play on a sound stage, furniture placed, and sent Spacey two cassette tapes, “pre-Lester” and “post-Lester,” different songs. Then, knowing what Lemmon meant to him, Mendes asked when he had last watched The Apartment. Watch it again, then let’s talk. What Lemmon does in that film, Mendes said, is incredible: there is never a moment where we see him change. He evolves because of what happens to him. That is what Lester needed. Do not let the audience see him change; let him evolve. Because they did not shoot in sequence, Spacey had to be in crazy shape from day one, trainer Mike Tosher. They used theatrical tricks the audience would not clock: three hairpieces, three costume colors and sizes, three makeups—from drab and gray (Mendes: “Kevin, you look like Walter Matthau. Would you please stand up a little bit?”) through highlights and tighter suits to golden hair, rosy cheeks, a tight fit.

The first two days, at Smiley’s burger joint, Mendes later called shit: costumes, location, being inside, the acting, everything but the script. A first-time director went back to Steven Spielberg and asked to reshoot. A couple of weeks later it was a drive-through window, new costumes, two days gone. Mendes told Spacey the worst thing that could happen had happened immediately, and after that he knew what he was doing. The original script was bookended by a trial: Ricky accused of Lester’s murder. They shot the trial for weeks. Spacey spent five days on wires, flying over the neighborhood in a bathrobe, catching a newspaper, alarm clock, wake up in bed. Mendes cut the flying and the trial. In a hallway at lunch, Mendes recorded a “guide track” of the narration on a cassette with a little microphone on the floor. Spacey never did it again. That is the narration in the movie. Mendes said he had no idea where the lines would land, so he read them innocently; headphones in a studio would have killed the ease. “He knew I would’ve come into the studio and fucked it up.”

The film’s beauty, for Spacey, is not the roses, not the girl’s body on the poster. It is the bag. Things we miss that are right in front of us. On the office set, on a bulletin board behind Lester, someone had stuck a scrap that said “Look closer.” A marketing person watching dailies zoomed in, took it to Mendes, and it became the poster. It was not in the script. The movie is about taking the time to look closer. Fridman asks about mortality and whether Spacey fears his own death. Yes, at his lowest point: the fear that there is no way out, no answer, nothing makes sense. Lester was liberated because he got to reinvent himself. Dick Van Dyke, ninety-eight, a friend, gets up and says it is a good day, I woke up. Spacey’s feeling about death is different than it was seven years ago. He would like to be in a place where if he dropped dead tomorrow, it would have been an amazing life. The lowest point, when death scared him, was November 1, 2017, and then Thanksgiving of that year.

Fridman says he wants to understand the sins Spacey committed and the ones he did not, and to respect due process that internet hysteria and clickbait do not. In his introduction he had already said he will talk with everyone, with empathy and backbone: he will not whitewash sins, and he will not reduce a guest to the worst caricature of them. Criminal and civil trials followed, including Anthony Rapp’s $40 million suit. In those trials, Fridman says, Spacey was acquitted, found not guilty and not liable. Spacey agrees. Fridman then asks, one by one: did he prevent anyone from leaving in a sexual context, for example by blocking a door? No. Did he always respect an explicit no? Yes. Anything sexual with an underage person? Never. Explicit exchange of sexual favors for career advancement? Correct, he did not. Then the harder question: in terms of bad behavior, what did he do, what was the worst, how often?

“Everybody has a Kevin Spacey story,” he has heard, “and what that tells me is that I hit on a lot of guys.” He did a lot of horsing around he thought was playful; he has learned it was not. He crossed boundaries, did things that were wrong, made mistakes, and that is in his past. For seven years, he says, he has had the conversations he needed, listened from a different perspective, and promised he will never behave that way again. He is a romantic; he has had a sexual life and fallen in love; that side of him has not been discussed. He does not have a violent bone in his body, and hearing acts described as very aggressive is incredibly difficult. He is deeply sorry he offended or hurt anyone. He accepts accountability for getting it wrong, and also lives in an industry where people meet at work, marry, have children. You have to be mindful that no one feels a job is in jeopardy. Some people, he adds, spent a brief time with him, presumed a mentorship, and participated in ways he did not see. There are accusations that simply did not happen, and he will not say that everything he was accused of is true, “because we’ve now proved that it isn’t.”

Fridman had said the world canceled him. Spacey disagrees. For seven years people have stopped him, sometimes several times a day, generous, kind, asking when he is getting back to work. There may be a very loud minority and a quieter majority. Betrayal, he says, can only come from those who truly know you; he has not been betrayed. Amends, he says, belong in private; some of those conversations ended with “I think I can forgive you now.” If he could talk to himself thirty or forty years ago, he would have found a way not to hide his sexuality so long. He is sorry about how he came out. In 2017 he posted that he did not remember what Rapp claimed from thirty-one years before, and that if an embarrassing moment had happened he would owe an apology—and, while he was at it, he came out, against the advice of Evan. Fridman calls it one of the worst social media posts of all time: a two-for-one of apparent admission and a grim coming-out. Spacey says he was backed into a corner, told not to push back, to be kind, and that the lawsuit did not even arrive until 2020. Liam Neeson and Sharon Stone have spoken for him; others who know him, Fridman says, are afraid. Spacey thinks it is the time, not just the industry: people are afraid they will be canceled if they stand up for someone who has been.

After 2017 he was gone from the last season of House of Cards. Fridman takes him back to the beginning. Spacey closed Richard III at BAM in March 2012 and started shooting the series two months later. Direct address—the character looking at each person close by, not a public monologue—is, he says, Shakespeare’s invention in that play, not Ferris Bueller’s. Night after night, around the world, he watched audiences become co-conspirators, enjoy themselves, then recoil when Richard kills the children in the tower. Fincher’s note for the camera was to imagine talking to your best friend, sharing how the game is played. In read-throughs Spacey cut speeches: the audience already knows; all I have to do is look. They tried to do those addresses in one take, no cut. Against their better instincts, he says, viewers still rallied around Frank. He cannot take credit for Shakespeare’s humor or Beau Willimon’s; actors borrow parts. “I love that woman more than sharks love blood” can be affection, ambition, and a joke at once. Sometimes he asked writers for two more words so the South Carolina rhythm would scan. Bill Clinton, he says, is not the model: Clinton was slow and felt your pain; Frank is deeper, more direct, less poetic.

He tells a Clinton story from a Democratic Party performance of The Iceman Cometh. The White House suggested the president see act one and leave; Spacey said they would cancel the event. Hickey, the role, is a philanderer who cannot live with a wife who forgives him too much. Two thousand people watched Clinton watch the play. At the curtain call Clinton thanked them for giving everyone “way too much to think about.” For House of Cards research, whip Kevin McCarthy would not meet until Spacey had the office say he was playing a Democrat, not a Republican; then McCarthy took him to whip meetings. Fincher directed the first two episodes and, Spacey says, deserves huge credit: later directors stayed inside that camera language, so the series felt like a long movie. Netflix had had no creative control; four years later they were the best in the business and began suggesting casting, writing, music. One fight: a scene shot with no score, two people talking; a cut arrived with music on it. Spacey asked whether they thought the audience could not listen for two and a half minutes. The show had already proved people would watch a season over a weekend.

Was the monster in Frank born when President Walker broke the secretary-of-state promise? It might have been the first betrayal the audience saw, Spacey says, not the first Frank had lived. Knight Takes King was the production company’s name. Power, for Frank, is an afterthought. What he loved was predicting how people would react—a behavioral psychologist, seventeen moves ahead, knowing how far to push someone so the next step would work. Fridman calls such roles evil. Spacey does not, not because he is being snarky, but because he cannot judge a character and then play him well. The people he plays do not walk around wearing that label. Let the audience judge. Wandering around in someone else’s clothes, he believes, teaches enormous empathy. He has also played Clarence Darrow three times, Recount, The Ref, Pay It Forward. Admirable qualities and ones unlike him have to sit on equal footing.

Talk of murderers on film brings Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a man who descends rather than a killer who always was. Spacey says Nicholson has no shame about being demonstrative and no problem playing the deeply flawed. A sound man, Dennis Maitland, told him a first-day story from Prizzi’s Honor: mic’ing Nicholson in the trailer, saying he was excited to work together again, from Missouri Breaks. Nicholson riffed about how stoned they all were on that picture—then folded the pants he had just taken off, and an eighth of coke dropped on the floor. “Haven’t worn these pants since Missouri Breaks.” Fridman loves the unapologetic self. The impression Spacey did at AFI was for Mike Nichols, who had a huge effect on the career.

In 1984 Spacey auditioned for the national tour of The Real Thing, which Nichols had directed on Broadway with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close. Nichols came down the aisle, asked where he had gone to school, then asked why he had not seen Hurlyburly up the block. Spacey could not afford a Broadway ticket. Nichols arranged it and told him to come back and audition. The company was William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Christopher Walken, Candice Bergen, Cynthia Nixon, Jerry Stiller. Nichols wanted him to understudy Keitel’s Phil: Keitel looked as if he could beat the shit out of everybody; Spacey was twenty-four. “It’s all about attitude. If you believe you can beat the shit out of everybody on stage, the audience will too.” He snuck onto the stage to find the props. He went on as Phil; Nichols watched act two and asked how soon he could learn Mickey. Then Eddie. He became the pinch hitter, every male part except Jerry Stiller’s. Two months after leaving, Nichols called about a film with Mandy Patinkin and Meryl Streep. Patinkin left; Jack Nicholson replaced him. Spacey’s first film scene, on his birthday, July 26, 1985, was a wink at Streep. He was so nervous he could not wink. Nichols had to calm him down and help him.

Fridman reads Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago: the line between good and evil runs through every heart and keeps changing place; the same human being, at various ages, can be close to a devil or to sainthood, but the name does not change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot. Spacey says he has been focused on the idea that every day is an opportunity to make better decisions, to learn, to grow. Then he talks about his father. He grew up not knowing if his parents loved him, particularly his father. He never had a sense that he was loved, and that stayed with him his whole life. Looking at who his father became was a gradual, slow, sad development.

Diaries and albums from the years as a medic in the U.S. Army show a man Spacey describes as serving with distinction; after the war, in Germany, what he wrote was as patriotic as any American soldier. He came home wanting to be a journalist, hoping to be the great American novelist, sat in an office, wrote for forty-five years, and never published. To make money he became a technical procedure writer: if you built the F-16, Spacey says, his father would have written the manual. Somewhere in the sixties and seventies he fell in with “pretend intellectuals” who gave him reasons he was not successful as a white Aryan man. Over time he became a white supremacist. As a boy Spacey was sat down for hours of “fucked up ideas of America, of prejudice, of white supremacy.” His sister said: don’t listen, he’s out of his mind. Even young, Spacey knew it was against people, and he loved people. He was afraid to bring his best friend Mike home, still a close friend, because Mike is Jewish, and because the office door might be open on a Nazi flag, pictures of Hitler, Nazi books.

When he found theater in the eighth grade, he piled on debate, choir, festivals, anything that would keep him from coming back home. He has had to reconcile the medic and the man his father became. He could never fill that gap. He has forgiven him. His mother made excuses: he just needs to get it off his chest. On the outside she loved him; she did not protect him. He has had to ask whether the attention he later felt was because he became successful and filled an emptiness she had lived with. He has no memory of his father saying he loved him. In a psychology program he watched the still-face experiment: parents play with a baby, then go blank, and for two or three minutes the child tries everything to get them back. Sitting in that theater, he saw himself—screaming, reaching, trying to get his parents’ attention. He had not remembered it that way before. He knew what that baby was going through.

How true is House of Cards? Politicians have told him it is not like that at all, and others that it is closer to the truth than anyone wants to admit. He falls on the second side. Fridman, who is about to interview world leaders, asks how you get Frank Underwood to say anything honest. In Frank’s case, Spacey says, tell him to look into the camera and he will tell you. Real life does not offer that channel. Spacey suggests trying it anyway: you like the series; look into the camera and tell us what is really going on. Fridman says he will try it with Zelenskyy and with Putin.

What does he hope his legacy is, as an actor and as a human being? People ask for his favorite performance. “I haven’t given it yet.” There is more he wants to be challenged by. It is nice to go back in conversation; he is focused on what is next. Does he hope the world forgives him? People go to church every week to be forgiven; he believes forgiveness and redemption are beautiful. His industry talks seriously about redemption—the wrongly accused man out of prison, the path back into society. In entertainment, he says, you are not offered that kind of path. He hopes the fear people are experiencing will subside and common sense will get back to the table. If it does, does he have another Oscar-worthy performance? If it would piss off Jack Lemmon again to win a third time, he absolutely thinks so. Fridman closes with Hemingway: the world is a fine place and worth fighting for, and he agrees on both counts. Spacey had already, in the Chinese telling of this hour, the more cautious half of that sentence in mind. On the recording, he simply thanks him.