Kevin Spacey gives typically bizarre response to Spacey Unmasked doc trailer
The two-part documentary comes out next month, while Spacey continues to talk about the allegations against him like he's a character in a TV show
Few celebrities, when accused of sexual assault or misconduct by multiple people, have reacted it to in a stranger fashion than actor Kevin Spacey. A full timeline of Spacey’s public weirdnesses since 2017, when Star Trek: Discovery star Anthony Rapp accused the actor of making unwanted sexual advances against him when Rapp was only 14, would be difficult to encapsulate here. But it’s hard not to think, for example, of the near-annual Christmas Eve videos that Spacey has released to his remaining fans over the last seven years, almost all of which have involved him pretending, at least briefly, to be his House Of Cards character Frank Underwood—killed off on the Netflix series after Rapp’s allegations kicked off more than a dozen other reports of misconduct—while talking vaguely about the enemies arrayed against him.
By comparison, Spacey’s response to news that a new documentary about him is being released next month is fairly low-key, if still defiantly weird. In response to the trailer dropping for Spacey Unmasked, a U.K. documentary about the allegations against him (which has been picked up for an eventual release Stateside by Warner Bros. Discovery), Spacey gave this statement to Variety: “I’m honored to be starring in my first film with Warner Brothers in many years. I hope the Academy takes note of some of the great acting by the lesser known cast.”
Which is, at the risk of editorializing, basically something a character in a TV show would say: A mixture of the on-paper kind of clever and a complete amoral callousness that is entertaining to hear coming out of the mouths of fictional characters, and pretty much nowhere else. Which makes us wonder: Does Spacey genuinely believe he’s Frank Underwood now? Is the man himself still in there, somewhere, beneath the layers of BBQ sauce and accent?
Spacey Unmasked was actually announced back in 2022—notably, before Spacey won a trial in the U.K. in which he was facing charges of sexual assault. (He previously also won in a suit from Rapp, accusing Spacey of sexual assault and sexual battery.) The documentary, which will air in two parts in the U.K., on May 6 and 7, reportedly talks to several men who weren’t involved in the British trial “about their experiences with Kevin Spacey, almost all of whom have never spoken before.”