Franco Nero heroically volunteers to spearhead the Kevin Spacey redemption campaign

“Cancel culture” is an illusion, most frequently conjured up exclusively by people who are utterly terrified of it for no particular reason, but in case you need more proof that it doesn’t exist: Kevin Spacey is back! And in a real movie (well…), not one of those goddamned “Let Me Be Frank” nightmares that he sometimes posts on Holidays. This comes from Variety, which says Spacey is going to make a “cameo” in L’uomo Che Disegnò Dio, an upcoming “low-budget indie” Italian film directed by Franco Nero. Vanessa Redgrave, Nero’s wife, might also be in the movie “if she can travel from England to Italy,” but that would also just be a cameo.

So it’s not a big-time Hollywood production, but Nero is making it pretty clear that he specifically chose Spacey for this nothing role and not that he just had to go with Spacey because he was the only actor available—after all, this is a Franco Nero movie (from Django!), and he’s got to have some pull in the Italian movie industry. Speaking with ABC News, Nero said that he’s “very happy” that Spacey “agreed to participate” in the movie, adding that he’s “a great actor.” This all comes a few weeks after a judge declared that an assault lawsuit against Kevin Spacey would not be allowed to proceed if the unnamed man who filed it didn’t agree to drop his anonymity.

Whether or not it’s a low-budget Italian indie, L’uomo Che Disegnò Dio will be Spacey’s first movie since 2018 when he appeared in Billionaire Boys Club. That movie was made before any allegations came out against Spacey but released after, and the distribution company specifically said that it wanted to release it out of respect for the rest of the cast and crew (which included Emma Roberts, Judd Nelson, and Billie Lourd). It made zero money. Before that, he was cut out of Ridley Scott’s All The Money In The World and replaced by Christopher Plummer.