KEVIN
SPACEY

With pivotal roles in modern classics, Kevin Spacey has emerged as one of the most important actors of the last twenty years.

Memorable mainly for his two Oscar winning roles as the strung out Lester Burnham in AMERICAN BEAUTY and as the iconic Keyser Soze/Verbal Kint in THE USUAL SUSPECTS, Spacey has always embraced the theater and independent art form most.

In the midst of a five year run directing the Old Vic Theater in London (and restoring that theater's heritage), Spacey gives it all again with a powerhouse performance in SHRINK as Dr. Henry Carter, a psychiatrist with issues deeper than his Hollywood A list clientele of patients.

To promote SHRINK, the Crypt was invited to a press conference where Spacey spoke about the role, its comparisions to Lester, working at the Old Vic, and what is next in this Crypt exclusive.

Q: Is there a winding down process for you after losing yourself in such an intense role? And if so, did it take long for this particular film?

KEVIN SPACEY: No. It’s very different in film, I think, than in theatre because you don’t ever really play the character. What you play is bits of a character – moments of a character – spread out over 25 or 30 days in various locations and with various actors. I think unless you’re playing a role that has days after days after days of having to be in the same place—and there are aspects of this character where he had to be in a state of denial or a state of self-medication, but he certainly wasn’t grappling with his grief. He’s actually trying to do everything he could to avoid it. And it’s really only through this remarkable young girl who gets thrown into his life that suddenly, someone starts to penetrate through that haze – if I could use the word haze. [Laughs] 

There are times when you do a play when you are living in a character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night and you can feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. There are some plays where I thought I might feel that way, but then there’s this period where you do get to come down – actually, before the curtain call – where your character decreases that level of intensity, and by the curtain call you’re okay. But in other plays I’ve done it’s hard for me to take the curtain call because I’m still in the world [of the character]. In movies you just rarely experience that—at least I rarely experience it. I’m able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie. 

Q: Did you have an idea what your character’s book was? And did you turn to any real-life therapists for advice on the role?

KS: I did think about the book he’d particularly worked on and written, although if you look at his shelf, there’s a whole slew of self-help books, and I always imagined him on Oprah or Dr. Phil. So I had to imagine what those books were about, because he’s apparently very well-known and very well-respected. His [book] titles might be a little sophomoric, but nonetheless, he seems to be doing very well at his profession, and yes, I would suspect your right that in the entertainment profession there are a whole slew of people making buckets of money as therapists. It doesn’t seem to be working! The only real experiences I’ve had with therapists were the ones who were working with me and my family when my mother was ill. It’s a slightly different kind of therapy, although what they are – and did brilliantly – is preparing you for what you might experience as a family member emotionally, and they were incredible at what they did and very helpful and generous. I’ve had friends that have gone to therapy a lot – not quite as much as Woody Allen, but quite a lot. And then I’ve had friends of mine who’ve gone to therapy for one specific issue, and whether that takes six months or eight months or whatever – or twenty years, I don’t know – then they saw, “Now I’m done. That’s the issue I’ve wanted to grapple with, and I’ve grappled with it.” So I didn’t really meet with any psychologists, in the same way when I did SWIMMING WITH SHARKS I didn’t meet with any studio executives. There just seemed to be enough in the script. And you also weren’t seeing him at his best in therapy sessions. You were seeing him often quite medicated in his therapy sessions. And it’s only this girl who begins to force him to come to grips with the things he’s experiencing and going through, and that to me was the most satisfying relationship in the film. 

Q: So you don’t have a negative view of therapists?

KS: No, I suspect there are as many good ones as bad ones. The results are in the pudding, as they say.

Q: Do you find yourself playing therapist at times to your co-stars or, when you’re directing, your actors? And is that something you identified with?

KS: I certainly identify with the role of mentor, and to some degree maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids both permanently at The Old Vic, and whenever we take a play around to other places, our educational work goes with us. And that, for me, is a really incredibly experience, particularly when we work with kids who aren’t actors and it’s just about using the tools of theatre as a ability for kids to come to grips with their own self-esteem, and their own sense of themselves, and confidence. 

When you work with kids who aren’t actors, they’ll ask you anything, they’ll say anything, and they’re remarkably honest. And so you go on this journey with kids where I’m trying to help them find a part of themselves they’ve never explored or experienced. And it’s particularly interesting when they have to do it in front of their peers or their parents, and sometimes how very reluctant they are when they first begin. And over a two or three-hour period of trying to encourage them and push them in certain directions and by the end of that three hours seeing how far these kids have come, is pretty incredible. That’s as close to a kind of satisfying result as I’ve experienced in that kind of relationship. I’m not somebody who sits around giving actors I’m working with advice. I tend to just keep my head down. [Laughs] 

Q: With all due respect, there are scenes in this where you look like shit. Is that through method-acting, through make-up, or did you not sleep for awhile?
 

KS: I had to look like shit. I can only say it’s a remarkable make-up department, because you can see I rarely look like shit, so they worked extra hard. [Laughs] Look, they gotta build me from the ground up starting at 6 a.m., and they just sort of reversed the process. There were times when we did seriously bad almost bruising under your eyes and sweat, and there were many days in the film where I didn’t shave, so I looked absolutely as unkempt as you could possibly get. So, it’s a bit silly when they come around with a mirror and say, “How do you think you look?” “I look like fuckin’ shit! It’s exactly how I’m supposed to look.” [Laughs] And I think you just get a little hint by the end of the movie that he’s starting to pull his head out of his own ass, and walk towards… shaving. It’s kind of fun. It’s nice to play a character that can look like shit and you’re not concerned about it. 

Q: Why was this role attractive to you?

KS: Well, it made me laugh about the narcissism that is Los Angeles. It touched me because of the relationship with Keke Palmer’s character. I just thought there was something so genuine about that girl and the way in which she came into his life, the things they end up helping each other get through, and the similarities of their grief. Keke was so cool to work with and we had such a great time. She’s a great example of someone who’s really talented and has their feet on the ground. Great family. Her mother was with us all the time. In fact, her mother really helped Keke. There was one scene where Keke has to cry when I’m reading a letter that she’s asked me to read, and Keke just couldn’t get there. She didn’t just want to cry, she wanted to burst out crying. So literally in the middle of the scene – there’s two cameras rolling – Keke goes, “I’ll be right back!” And she got up and ran out of the room, and we were still rolling. And I was like, “We’re not cutting? We’re still rolling? Okay…” And then literally three minutes later she came back and sat down, and we started the scene again, and then she said, “I’ll be right back!” And she ran out of the room again. And I’m thinking, “There’s something going on and I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to go with it.” And finally she came back and I turned around and she did the scene and she burst into tears. And I found out later, what she was doing was she was going out and talking to her mom, and her mom was telling her, “Remember when you’re friend got really sick…,” and she was giving her all this background, emotional stuff for her to imagine and remember, and her mother finally got her to where she wanted to get, and Keke was so pleased about that. But it was a very funny scene because she was gone out of the room, and we kept rolling.

Q: Actors have said that acting for them is a form of therapy. Do you feel that way as well? And if so, which one of your characters has given you a particular insight on yourself?

KS: Well first, I do think that acting is probably a great form of therapy, because you get to express emotions and go to places that most people don’t get a chance to do in their daily lives. You get a chance to go places that most people don’t get to go to – both physically, and emotionally. I’ve always thought it was a very opening and generous way to delve into your own psyche. And I think that if you were habitually forced to look at life from someone else’s point of view, or put yourself in someone else’s shoes, which is what the job of acting is, it’s an incredibly humanizing force. And I think that makes it—one of the most positive things about it both from this side of it but also from the viewer side of it, is it makes it that much harder to be prejudiced against other people when you actually have to go to a place of what motivates somebody, and why somebody did something. I’ve had recent experiences where the job of being an actor is like being a detective or being a therapist. You have to unearth motive versus how it looked, or how someone might have taken it. I just played Jack Abramoff in this film about this disgraced lobbyist [CASINO JACK], and it’s so interesting to unearth the facts versus the impression; unearth motive versus the way people decide ‘someone must have been like this.’ Our job, in certain ways, is to shed light on places that are dark. And I think that’s certainly what a therapist tries to do. For me, I’m about to have the experience again of playing a character who profoundly affected me when I play Clarence Darrow, when I do INHERIT THE WIND at The Old Vic. So I’m about to be able to go back to a character who I have enormous affection for, and lumber around in his ideas for a couple of months, which I’m very excited about.

Q: Could you talk about the parallels between your character in SHRINK and Lester [from AMERICAN BEAUTY]? And also, how the process differed for you as an actor, delving into these two character’s disillusioned psyches? 

KS: The thing about Lester in comparison to Henry Carter is I never thought Lester gave up. Despite what Lester was facing, despite him hating his job, and hating his life, and hating his marriage, I always thought he was a winning personality. I never thought that he was somebody who allowed himself to fall into the muck in such a way that he couldn’t climb himself out. I think Carter’s different. I think Carter actually kind of embraces his muck, and he’s about [up to his neck] in it. And it takes a lot to get him out of it, and it’s surprising things that get him out of it in the end. And maybe it has to do with Lester being in an unnamed suburbia, and Lester is knee-deep in Los Angeles – which is the narcissistic capital of the world. The obvious similarity is the smoking pot and the self-medicating, but I quite frankly think that Lester was smoking much better shit! [Laughs] 

Q: Can you describe your experience as a Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford? And what advice would you give to recently graduated theatre students?

KS: First of all, I was very honored to be the Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at St. Catz at Oxford. It was a year-long position. A little disappointed that I didn’t get a robe as professor. They don’t robe you, because apparently that would upset all the ones that actually worked for tenure. What was most interesting about it actually was they don’t have a drama department at St. Catz. So you have kids who are studying the Greeks, studying the classics, studying the sciences, and you have to kind of ferret out the ‘secret directors’ and the ‘wannabe actors’ and the playwrights. So, they have to sign up and come to workshops, and you slowly have to realize that the guy who’s actually taking math wants to secretly be a playwright. But apparently they’re not allowed to talk about it with their professors, and I said, “But guys, showing up to my workshop—you’re blowing it because now they know you’re secret ‘artists-in-waiting’.” It’s interesting because you weren’t dealing with people who were going to do it as a profession necessarily. I probably was there about ten or eleven times over the past year, and I was very happy to have done it. With regard to advice, if you’ve trained and come out of a theatre school that was really about training and not academic—otherwise, I would say training is, to me, the most important thing for a young actor or actress to do; to learn about your voice, learn about your instrument, even if you want to go into film and television. In my opinion, the truth is, most actors who have the best careers and did the most extraordinary work in film were the ones that came out of theatre. And you can go back through the history of movies, and I think that’s true. Even though we have much more content in film and television, you can’t go wrong by learning your craft as a theatre artist. 

Q: In SHRINK, Keke Palmer’s character finds solace in going to the movies. Have you had that experience of finding solace by going to the cinema?

KS: Absolutely. The Melody Theatre in Thousand Oaks, California, which is gone, and the Nuart Theatre in Santa Monica, which is still there, we used to go ALL the time when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. We used to go all the time, and we would see Peter Brook’s King Lear, and we would see Eraserhead, and we would see the midnight shows they had. We would go and see films that you couldn’t see anywhere else. I just remember once we were so angry because the prints they use to have were really bad, just jumping all over the place, so we knocked on the owner’s door one day and we said he should change the theatre’s name from ‘Nuart’ to ‘Oldart.’ But we saw incredible movies, and there’s no doubt in my mind that whatever town you live in, whatever experience you’re having as a kid, to be able to escape in a film, there’s nothing like it. And you feel like a grown-up because you’re sometimes sneaking into movies you shouldn’t be watching, and you’re underage. It’s very cool. 

Q: Which movies did you sneak into?

KS: STRAW DOG I saw when I should have never seen STRAW DOGS. It scared the shit out of me!

Q: Could you talk about the scene you shared with Robin Williams? It’s a very intriguing scene, and a lot of it felt very real and improvised.

KS: Some of it was scripted. I’ve known Robin a long time, and what I liked working with him, and what I liked about the several scenes we had, was he was kind of riffing and improv-ing and doing joking kind of stuff, which is in a way kind of what you expect when you see Robin. But then I really like the fact that he let me nail him and tell him to stop it, and he did. And to me, that was pretty great – to be the Robin Williams that you expect, and then not. And a lot of it was improv because Robin was going off, and I was going off trying to stop him. It was telling him, “You can be as funny as you want to be and you can crack jokes all day, but that’s not going to solve your problems.” And I thought that was pretty cool of Robin to go there, and we had a really nice time. He’s so much fun to work with, it’s crazy. And I’m so happy that he’s doing great and he’s healthy, and his operation was terrifically successful, and I’m really happy about that.

Q: How do you keep your sanity on a film set with all the hats you wear—as actor, producer, and sometime director?

KS: I try very, very hard to pay very little attention to bullshit, because people can create drama. It seems to be all that people do, is create drama where there was none before. And that usually happens when you have thirty-seven producers on a movie who don’t actually produce. They’re there, they’re sitting in chairs, but they don’t actually do anything. The job of producing, I think, is to provide a film, obviously, with the resources it needs both financial, and in terms of a crew. In terms of people who are good at what they do, professional at what they do, and to be a part of creating an environment where a director can get his or her vision onto the screen. That’s the job. Now, there’s a lot of producers who believe that they’re ‘creative producers’, so they like to get their thumb and finger in every pie going. That’s not who I am. I like to trust the people I hire. And certainly my job as a producer at Trigger Street with my partner Dana Brunetti, or my job at The Old Vic as the Artistic Director, is to be a magnet and to bring together all those elements that you think will best serve the telling of that story. I just don’t pay that much attention to all the drama. I focus on the work you have to do. Try to trust the artists you bring on and hire—because I think it affects a director, and a writer and actors if they feel they’re constantly being watched like hawks. Like somehow you don’t trust them. When we do a play at The Old Vic, I don’t show up to a rehearsal if I’m not the director of the play until they’re ready to see me. I trust the people I hire, and I think that sense of confidence for them is huge. And it’s certainly true on a film set where every single day you’re going to run into problems that you didn’t expect, but that’s the challenge of it. The challenge is not so much trying to stop those things from happening, because that’s life, but it’s how you respond to those things as a producer or director that I think is what makes the great producers or directors of this world. So, I try to never, ever allow the BS to come to the working environment in a way that anyone really notices. Try to keep a happy environment, because I think people who are in an environment that feels creative and feels supportive then come to work every day wanting to do the best job. So that’s my modus operandi. 

Q: You wear so many hats, heading a production studio, The Old Vic, and acting/directing. How do you manage to do it? And do you ever regret all this responsibility? 

KS: I don’t regret it yet. I’m seven years in living in London, coming into the end of our fifth season working at The Old Vic. And the truth is, when I started at The Old Vic a part of me thought Trigger Street would take a hit. I wasn’t going to be around to take meetings or lead things, but oddly, we’ve never been busier and have never had more films going, both in the independent world and the studio world. The balance, for me, is struck by an extraordinary staff, and certainly Dana running Trigger Street allows me to do the work I’m doing in London. And I have a great staff in London. And I believe in trusting the people I work with, and I delegate. We’ve got a staff now of some 56 people at The Old Vic, and we started with me and a producer in a dressing room with a phone. We have a smaller staff at Trigger Street, but Dana runs that company brilliantly. So, the balance for me has worked out alright. My priority has been The Old Vic, and I sneak movies in when I can. But for me, it’s no different when movies were my priority and I was sneaking in plays, I’ve just sort of flipped it on its ear, and so far it’s working alright. 

Q: Thank you for your time Kevin and best of luck with SHRINK.

KS: Thank you.

(Special thanks to Jeff Hill & Jessica Uzzan at Int'l House Of Publicity)