Anthony Rapp testifies that seeing American Beauty was “unpleasantly familiar”

Kevin Spacey is currently on trial in New York over a $40 million civil lawsuit from Anthony Rapp, who has accused him of making “unwanted sexual advances when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26” (as this Variety story puts it). Rapp has been testifying, having already described the “alarming” encounter he allegedly had with Spacey in 1986 last week, as well as the reason he didn’t tell anyone about it at the time.

Deadline reports that Spacey’s lawyers have been trying to argue that Rapp made up his allegations against Spacey out of professional jealousy, saying that Rapp was frustrated that his decision to come out as openly gay had left him with limited career opportunities as an actor. Apparently that led to Rapp discussing how he feels about Spacey’s career, which ended up with him testifying that 1999’s American Beauty was the last of Spacey’s movies that he ever saw (up until then, Rapp said he felt like it was his “duty” to see Spacey’s movies because “they were by and large very acclaimed”). In American Beauty, Spacey plays a man who is attracted to—and tries to have sex with—his daughter’s teenage friend, which Rapp says was “unpleasantly familiar” for him.

Anthony Rapp first accused Kevin Spacey of sexual misconduct in 2017, saying he was “compelled” to come forward after hearing the accusations against Kevin Spacey. Thought it was his first time naming Spacey in public, he said at the time that he had privately been telling friends about his allegations for years. There was also an old Advocate interview with Rapp from 2001, which resurfaced after his allegations against Spacey came out, in which he accused an unnamed actor in an unnamed “award-winning film” of making an unwanted sexual advance toward him when he was 14.