Kevin Spacey
Master Thespian
by Alex S. Morrison

It’s not a story you hear every day: Two-time Academy Award-winning actor abandons Hollywood fame and fortune in favor of returning to his theatre roots. Then again, the Juilliard-trained Kevin Spacey is not your everyday actor, nor is London’s Old Vic your everyday theatre.

So it was that, just a few years after winning the Best Actor Oscar for his role in American Beauty, Spacey put his lucrative film career on the backburner in 2003 to accept a 10-year appointment as Artistic Director of the newly-formed Old Vic Theatre Company, which was established in an effort to save the historic theatre once run by Sir Laurence Olivier.

When he’s not making critically acclaimed turns in sold-out shows such as Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon For The Misbegotten and David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, Spacey occasionally ventures back to Hollywood to produce and star in films like 2004’s Beyond The Sea and this year’s 21 (not to mention reuniting with The Usual Suspects director Bryan Singer for Superman Returns). But the 49-year-old thespian makes no bones about the fact that the theatre is his first love, so we were understandably excited when he made time to sit down with us for this recent interview in Las Vegas.

How did your experience at Juilliard shape you?
There were probably 5,000 actors and actresses who applied for the school and only 28 of us who were chosen for a class, so you start off feeling like one of the thoroughbreds. In my class, there was Elizabeth McGovern, Kelly McGillis, Ving Rhames and Evan Handler, and in the class below me there was Marcia Cross, David Hyde Pierce and Val Kilmer, so you see a lot of people you wind up growing up in the business with. It was life changing because it gives you a tremendous amount of confidence. But I think what makes great training great is that it keeps happening.

How so?
There are a lot of pieces of information that don’t have any value until you put them into a personal context. There were countless times when I’d find myself having a moment between myself and another actor or a conversation with the director, and someone would happen and it was like a flash card came over my eyes. I’d go, “THAT’S what they were talking about!” The lesson isn’t necessarily learned while you’re in school, but when you apply it later. So in many ways I’m still learning those lessons.

Is there anything you learned in college that has really stuck with you?
The thing it taught me that I’m most grateful for is the technical facility– the ability to get up on stage every single night, 8 performances a week, 12-14 weeks in a row, never lose my voice, always be alive and ready to take it somewhere else, and be there for your acting partners. And that’s still happening for me.

When you first got the scripts for your breakthrough films, The Usual Suspects and Se7en, did you know they’d become classics?
No, when I saw Se7en I thought the movie was gonna tank. It was too dark, and I thought audiences would never accept that Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt– who always win– lose at the end of the movie. I always thought The Usual Suspects would find critics, but I wasn’t sure it would find an audience. That was the first experience where I put myself completely in the hands of a director, and when I saw the film I was dazzled by what he’d done. That, to me, was a great example of why film is a director’s medium. He went off and made this great painting: I just gave him some colors.

Are there any insights on acting you’ve taken away from directing films like Albino Alligator and Beyond the Sea?
One thing I confirmed in my own mind was how important it is for actors to give a variety of possibilities to a director in the course of a scene. If an actor yells in every single take, you don’t have any takes where they do it in a different way. What you do then is give the director no choices in editing, where you can rewrite a film on a certain level. I’ve always tried to give a variety of interpretations, and then it’s the director’s job to decide on the final rhythm of the performance. I don’t go to dailies, so I never see what I’ve done, so when I finally see the movie sometimes I’m really angry and sometimes I’m blown away. I don’t let any of the actors on my movies see dailies, because I don’t want them second-guessing their own work or falling in love with certain moments.

How have your duties as the Old Vic’s artistic director changed the way you approach your film career?
My priorities just changed many years back when I made the decision that I wanted to start this theatre company. Theatre had always been my primary allegiance, and while I spent 10 years being driven by a personal ambition to have a film career, I got to a point where that was no longer of interest to me. I love movies and have been very grateful to them, because without them I couldn’t be in the position I’m in and doing what I’m able to do on behalf of the theatre. But I’m now doing exactly what I want to be doing, and don’t feel like I’m trapped in the cog of the wheel anymore. So I’m much happier, and feel that the work I’m doing there is the most important work I’ve ever done.

What has the Old Vic experience taught you about acting?
What I've learned is how to create a story arc over the course of two hours. If you haven't had that theatre experience, it's much harder in a film situation to figure out how to create an arc in a very crazy shooting schedule. The frustration as an actor in movies is you never get to play the part [straight through]. But in the theatre you learn in front of an audience, because they're going to tell you very quickly whether you're holding their attention or not, and whether they're following the story or not. I’ve always believed that the work I've been able to do in the theatre has had a huge effect on the work I've done in film.

With all your theatrical responsibilities, what’s the most difficult aspect of making time to produce a film like 21?
My job as a producer is to make sure we’re able to get the movie that we wanted on film. When we first found the book 5 or 6 years ago we were ahead of the curve, but after we sold it to MGM we went into a holding pattern while they got bought out. Once Sony picked it up, we had to look at how we could make Vegas interesting again after all the World Series of Poker [broadcasts] and Vegas movies and shows that have come out in the last 6 years. Fortunately we were welcomed by the casinos, and I suspect it’s because they like the film suggesting to audiences that they can come to Vegas and break the bank. (Laughs)

Bryan Singer recently said he’s moving forward with a Superman Returns sequel. Will you be coming back for that?
I signed a deal to do a second film, but the truth is that you probably know more than I do about it. Bryan and I spoke last spring and my suspicion is that, if they are moving forward, it wouldn’t start shooting until 2009 and would be released in 2010. I just don’t think they’re ready yet.

What are your primary goals for your remaining years with the Old Vic Theatre Company?
I hope to be able to leave the theatre company in a position where I’ve raised enough money for them that whoever takes over my role as Artistic Director won’t have to spend as much time fundraising as I’ve had to. A lot of people don’t understand that I didn’t step into a role that existed. For 30 years, the Old Vic was a booking house – a theatre you could rent. When the National Theatre left in 1976 under Laurence Olivier’s artistic direction, it became a booking house. There was no theatre company, no education program, no outreach program, no “Old & New Voices,” so we’ve been trying to build a theatre company that will survive in a commercial world, even though we are a charitable organization. But when you have a 1,000-seat theatre and no subsidy from the government, it takes a lot to raise that money. So I hope to be able to leave an endowment to cover the running costs of the Company, to convince some of the government agencies that our outreach work deserves to be subsidized, and to raise the money to renovate the building to 21^st century standards, which is a £30 million campaign. Those are my broader goals over the next five or so years.