We’ll say this about the Kevin Spacey Acting Comeback Tour—an event we did not sign up for, and would just as soon be left off of, thanks: It’s a hell of a lot fucking weirder than any of the shit Louis CK has been trying to pull. Spacey has, after all, made exactly one major public appearance in the year-plus since he was accused (by multiple men) of sexually harassing or abusing them over the course of his career, when he posted a truly bizarre video of himself channeling human Foghorn Leghorn Frank Underwood in response to being charged with felony sexual assault. To be fair, Spacey’s latest attempt at auto-resurrection isn’t quite as strange—in so far as at no point did he seem to be blurring the line between himself and a rib-drenched Netflix TV character—but it was still probably pretty odd for anyone visiting the National Roman Museum this week, especially if they didn’t have “disgraced actor yells thinly-metaphorical poetry at me” penciled in on their itineraries.
And yet, that is exactly what apparently happened, as Spacey—presumably with the museum’s permission, in so far as no one went after him with a broom—set himself up next to an ancient Greek statue and serenaded the public with an English translation of Gabriele Tinti’s “The Boxer.” (And in case you were wondering, why, yes, said poem is about a heroic, unappreciated figure who suffers and martyrs himself for his adoring public; why do you ask?) Per The Daily Beast, only a few journalists were tipped off that the unannounced event would be happening; the ones who attended were apparently promised interviews, but they ended up being “just a few meaningless words over Prosecco in the museum cafe after the shamed Oscar-winning actor was chased away by the paparazzi.”
Anyway, it’s not clear if Spacey views this as a launchpad back to acting success, or if he’s just trying to drive down museum attendance across Europe as some sort of wider nefarious scheme; we know we’d be leery to check out the Uffizi or the Louvre this week, lest Spacey pop up and start blasting Walt Whitman at us in that goddamn “Southern” drawl.