W, July, 1998

Actor Kevin Spacey breaks out of the crazed psycho mold in a British production of The Iceman Cometh that he plans to bring to Broadway.

Kevin Spacey has a secret all right, and it's this: The man who's made a career out of playing monumental psychos is really just a nice normal guy. Cultured, even.

But he had to go to London to prove it.

"It's a bit tired now, isn't it?" he says of all the last few years' speculation about his private character. He delivers the statement half sneering, half laughing, but quite affably as he sips a cappuccino on Upper Street in the trendy Islington section of London, wearing a big pullover and corduroy trousers. That demon gling moviegoers have come to expect in his eyes seems to be on vacation.

Spacey's in London to star in a production of Eugene O'Neill's 1939 play The Iceman Cometh, at the famed Almeida Theater nearby. (The play has since moved to the Old Vic, where it runs until August.)

"It's not that I'm concerned about trying to present an image," he continues. "It's really about an image that--as hard as I have worked not to capitalize on it--has been created by an idea and a force with which I had very little to do."

That is to say, he is not Keyser Soze, the enigmatic string-puller that won him a Best Supporting Oscar in The Usual Suspects. Nor is he the self-loathing serial killer John Doe of Seven or the sadistic egomaniac from Swimming With Sharks.

"Been there. Done that," he sighs. "Can do it with my eyes closed. Bored. Let's move on."

Still, playing the psycho has been good to Kevin Spacey. But the downside has been the media's apparent certainty that a person with such a dark image must be drawing from real life. The actor's now so notoriously press-wary, he's squirreled awy--unread--what the Almeida's artistic director Jonathon Kent describes as "some of the best reviews I've ever seen for an actor, American or British." They're being collected by Spacey's New York-based assistant until the play's run is complete, so as not to influence his performance as "Hickey," Theodore Hickman, the traveling salesman Jason Robards immortalized in O'Neill's most tragic, and some think, most important play.

And he decided against giving interviews to the British papers, since, among other reasons, the entire run was sold out almost immediately. But that didn't stop the London Evening Standard from putting an "interview" with the actor on the cover of its weekend magazine just before the play opened in April.

"I cracked it open and discovered," Spacey says over his omelet, "that they had, without making it clear to their readers, taken quotes I had given two years ago at a movie junket and strung them together like I'd just said them yesterday. Well, you just can't do anything about that, so why bother? Meanwhile, a lot of other editors were angry I'd turned them down. And the Standard said this was my debut in London. They weren't paying attention. I was here on stage 11 years ago doing Long Day's Journey Into Night.

"You see," he continues calmly, "most journalists have seen me over the last four years in maybe four movies. I've been working as an actor on stage, in television and films for 20 years. I went to Juilliard; I was on stage in New York. For almost 17 of them, I never played those spooky characters. If you look at my history in the theater, I've always played men who are at some kind of moral internal crisis and trying to better themselves or the people around them. I find myself saying to reporters, I appreciate that you view me from a narrow scope, but I don't!' I've come to recognize the impression is there. What I have to be conscious of is, how do I shift it?"

He's not talking about a public persona. He's talking about professional versatility. Spacey just completed two movies that couldn't be more different from his recent work: The Negotiator, Warner Bros.' big action hopeful coming out at the end of July, and a film version of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, in which he stars as the decent guy opposite a selfish Hollywood womanizer played by Sean Penn. (Robin Wright Penn, Meg Ryan and Garry Shandling are also in it.)

And, of course, there's Iceman. "I've always related to O'Neill," he says. "His father was a successful but artistically failed actor; my father was a technical writer who was a failed novelist." Spacey was born in 1956 in West Orange, New Jersey, but moved to California at an early age, and, like the young O'Neill, spent a lot of his youth on the move. A confessed goofball kid, he could never cut it in school, and was shipped off to a military academy after he burned down his sister's treehouse in a fit. But he hated the military school so much, he got himself expelled by braining a fellow cadet with a tire. He would up attending Chatsworth high school, where he was classmates with Val Kilmer. Once he started acting, with the encouragement of his mother (whom he took to the Oscars when he won), he focused that angry energy into his work.

Spacey's interest in the Almeida grew from seeing six years' worth of its productions--most recently, Ralph Fiennes in Chekhov's Ivanov. His own turn on the Almeida stage had its genesis in a dinner with Kent, whom he regaled with a tale of his early years off-Broadway in the early Eighties. "I was just beginning in the New York theater, and I got an audition to replace Alan Rickman in this huge and successful production of Les Liasons Dangereuses on Broadway," Spacey recalls telling Kent. "I met the director, Howard Davies, and the writer, Christopher Hamptson, who went to the producers--the Shuberts, now my good friends--and they could not get clearance to cast me, because I wasn't really anybody. And they wanted to cast an unknown actress named Glenn Close, which they were also denied. Howard was so miffed, they closed the production.

"So Jonathon suddenly asked, 'Would you ever consider coming and working with us?' I said, 'Ask!' I'd been looking for over two years for the right play to come back in. About two weeks later, he called and said, 'What about The Iceman Cometh with Howard Davies directing?' I said, 'Bastard! You knew I'd have to say yes!'"

Not only did Spacey have unfinished business with Davies--but Davies had unfinished business with Iceman. He was the director of the 1976 production of the play starring Ian Holm as Hickey, when Holm had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a scene and couldn't return to the stage. (In fact, it would be 22 years before Holm would do live theater again.)

Hickey is indeed a daunting character to take on--sort of the American dramatic equivalent of Hamlet or Peer Gynt. The play is O'Neill's longest, with the Almeida production running over four hours--three and a half of which have Spacey center stage and talking: not a small risk for the guy best known recently for stealing most of L.A. Confidential by playing it slick, fast, and fabulous.

"Of course it was a risk," says Spacey. "What else was there to do? For me, it was like going back to college, back to my roots. Theater is what I love the most, the place I feel most at home. This has been such an incredible challenge; it's been exhilarating, exhausting, beautiful and sad. My feeling is: They'll always be making movies. And I'll always be happy to participate in those I feel I can pull off. But this is going to happen once. Once in my life.

"Luckily my agents and manager are with me on this one: Why do something just for money? I've been very smart with money over the years. I don't need to work. I have all the freedom I could possibly want. So why take movie roles that are gonna make me look stupid?"

Spacey recalls a story--as he often does when he isn't invoking his spot-on impressions of Johnny Carson, Al Pacino or Christopher Walken (which launched him into an early career in stand-up comedy) about the director John Huston. Huston supposedly was sitting on a beach in Puerto Vallarte with a young producer who told him about another producer who was very rich--and dying. "Son of a bitch!" Huston screamed. "He's gonna die rich--what a waste! To die rich means you didn't spend it."

Spacey decided to spend his money to produce the second run of Iceman at the Old Vic. "I don't lead an extravagant life," he explains. "I thought, there's nothing I'd rather be doing, no place I'd rather go."

Several of the play's more high-profile actors, like Rupert Graves and Clarke Peters, had other obligations, but many of the cast, including veteran Tim Pigott-Smith, stayed on, and Spacey's now trying to bring them to Braodway with him later this year.

"These people in the play meant everything to O'Neill," he says. "One saloon owner actually saved O'Neill's life when he tried to commit suicide in his room over the bar. It's so fantastic to see somebody write about a group of eccentric characters without judgment. O'Neill just presents them. And loves them. And embraces them. In the end, the greatest--and saddest--gift Hickey has to give them is there pipe dreams back. He realizes they can't live without them.

" Hickey is a far cry from the Spacey gallery of madmen moviegoers have grown to know, and, if not love, at least admire--as is Chris Sabian, the nearly heroic character he plays opposite Samuel L. Jackson in director F. Gary Gray's The Negotiator.

"I thought it was a great opportunity to do a more commercial type movie than I've done before," he says. "I wanted to see if I could take a step I've never taken--and still live with myself in the morning. I didn't want to do something that was just so dumb I'd feel like I'd made a big mistake." His salary, reported to be in the neighborhood of $9 million, may have taken some of the sting out of the decision.

The movie was originally meant to be a Stallone vehicle. When offered the number-two role at that point, Spacey turned it down flat. When Stallone pulled out, the producers offered the lead to Spacey. "I didn't know if audiences were ready to see me do that," he says. "Audiences like you the way they discovered you. If you take too fast a turn, they laugh you off the screen. So I wasn't ready to be the big hero. I thought it would be more credible to play off of Sam." (The two had previously worked together in A Time to Kill.)

That same sense of proportion led him to suggest changing the original ending--a shoot-em-up featuring 150 cops--to one involving only him, Jackson and Ron Rifkin.

Still, not all of Spacey's star turns have created star movies. The high-profile Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, journalist John Berendt's literary journey into the heart of deepest, darkest Savannah, directed by Clint Eastwood, was an out-and-out flop and a critical disaster. Spacey's performance as millionaire and suspected murderer Jim Williams was well-received but he doesn't quite understand why the movie wasn't.

"I don't know what went wrong," he admits. "I can tell you I had one of the great experiences making that film: the process of it, working with Clint and the company--trying to find out who this very enigmatic, very charming figure Jim Williams really was. But realize this: the book sold three million copies. If all those people had come on opening weekend, it would still have been a bad weekend at the movies. So I don't think the public had a bad reaction to the movie. It's simply that it was not so well-received across the board and that it didn't find any word of mouth.

" While many of the reviewers seemed to think that shoot-from-the-hip wasn't the most appropriate director to bring the camp Southern flavor of Savannah to the screen, Spacey remains an Eastwood loyalist. "While we were doing it, people asked me, 'Why Clint? This is strange.' I disagree. Ultimately I think the story is about tolerance. It's about a man who comes from New York City to this place he thinks is exotic, strange and different and meets these characters who are odd and eccentric, and perhaps even judges them. But by the end of the experience in the book, he decides to move to that city. He embraces it--and ambiguity--in a way he never thought possible. And I think on some level, that fits very clearly into Clint Eastwood's version of America. It made sense to me that he wanted to do this movie. Others can be the judge of whether or not he did it successfully."

Next year, Spacey is slated to star in a film he's producing with Mel Gibson called Ordinary Decent Criminal, about a charming Irish Robin Hood who robbed banks for 15 years without getting caught. And he's also starting to write some projects of his own to direct that are, he says, closer to his heart than the gangster subject of his directorial debut, Albino Alligator.

"I also want to do a comedy, because that's how I got started. Did you see my Saturday Night Live last year? I got good feedback on that. But I want a Preston Sturges-type comedy. I just can't do toilet humor. And so many of the ones I read are down on that level. I'd love to find something really romantic that would be unexpected from me at this point. I'd love to do a romance--sure!"

With the nearly 39-year-old Spacey's dramatic ambitions at least temporarily fulfilled, his fantasies are of a more personal nature. "I want to travel a little bit," he says. "But then I may decide, because of--um, uh--something in my own personal life, to settle down a bit and stay in one place for a while. I'd like to be in one place. I now have two dogs--Mini (which he got in London) and Legacy. I feel like I'm headed in a whole new direction."

And that's about as personal as Spacey likes to get in interviews--not, he insists, because he has anything to hide--but simply because he believes, he says, in "keeping the mystique.

"There is way too much behind-the-scenes exposure of the movie business," he says. "There's an insatiable appetite that needs to be filled every day and that is entertainment. I'm an actor. That's what I wish to be. I wish to entertain.

But his discretion, he admits, sometimes makes things worse. "Because I don't wish to be fodder for the mill, they make up things about me," he argues. "I don't even give them, 'My girlfriend and I have been together for nine years and we're incredibly happy.' Well, when you don't give them names, they think you're hiding something. So then some a-----e decides to make up a story. I think what motivates many of these people is pretty sad. I have always chosen to try to maintain a degree of dignity about that stuff. The people that are important to me--my family, colleagues, friends--they know what the scoop is, and that's all that's really important. Not for a second have I ever gotten an indication from any of the thousands of letters I receive that anybody gives two hoots about what my private life is. Nobody cares. They like the work.

" He does admit, though, to peeking at the gossip columns himself once in a while. "You ain't gonna hear it from me, a New Yorker, that I don't know what it's like to have a cup of coffee and open up a tabloid in the morning. We all know what it's like. But about two years ago, I began to feel there was this aggressive thing starting to happen. I saw it with particular actors. I know some people ask for it. And if they ask for it, they deserve it. There are a lot of people who don't ask for it. Most actors I know just love the work and want to do their job."

Spacey's big burn was the now-infamous Esquire piece last year, which revolved around insinuations about his sexual preference. Looking back, he merely shrugs. "Well," he says, "I've said all I can possibly say on that score. At the end of the day, there's nothing you can do about a thing like that."

Of course, keeping your public wondering does have some advantages. "It's so funny that I get written up as this cool guy," he says with a laugh and a shrug. "If only they knew. I'm such a nerd!"

Maybe so, but a few nights later, he celebrated the end of Iceman's Almeida run with dinner at the Ivy in London surrounded by Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman and Matt Dillon. The fact is, he's the nerd everyone wants to hang out with.

"I think we're gonna see," he says, rising from his chair, "over the next 10 or 15 years of my life," and this he punctuates with a big smile, gathering up his sweater, "just how dark I am!"

He's laughing--lightly, rather than maniacally, sending up his own image. So does this mean he really is the good guy?

"Well, I'm sure having one hell of a good time!" is all he'll say as he heads out the door toward the theater.

By Merle Ginsberg, W, July, 1998