Buzz Magazine, October, 1996

"How is my life going? On a scale of one to ten, I'd say I'm due to get hit by a bus tomorrow."

That's Kevin Spacey talking. Kevin Spacey, who ten years ago was dodging his landlady, collecting cans in a shopping cart for dog food money, and doing Sleuth at a New Jersey dinner theater--all in the same day.

Grim but true. Looking hip enough to front a ska band--porkpie hat, brown leather jacket, matching silk shirt, slacks, and white suede loafers sans socks--he betrays no hint of either the dark tormentors he's played in The Usual Suspects and Seven or the lonely, tortured loser he describes as inhabiting his own psyche a decade earlier. And yet, insists the Tony-winning, Oscar-snagging actor, to grab a handle on K. Spacey, monstro success, a soul has to rewind back to this single guy's dark days in Manhattan and meet K. Spacey, obsessive failure.

Listen: "From 1982 to 1984, I just didn't sleep. I could not fucking relax! I would just stay up, coming up with plans how I was gonna make it, writing this really depressing shit in my diary, or comparing myself to people I knew who were doing well.

The worst part is, even when I got work in regional theater in Williamstown or Seattle, I'd come back to town and I wouldn't have an apartment anymore. Talk about a living hell! It's, like, summer in New York, the humidity's 900 percent, and I'm banging on friends' doors asking them if I can stay on their couch. 'And by the way, would you mind if my ninety-pound Labrador comes too?' I mean, that's desperation. That is the fucking defination of desperation."

What makes this saga even more bizarre is the absolute ease with which this native Angeleno relates it. If Mahatma Gandhi popped back from the dead to chat about wife beating, the scene could not be any more surreal. Spacey is so relaxed, he soothes everyone around him, as if emitting Valium fumes. We are, at the moment, in his condo-size trailer, alongside the set of L.A. Confidential, where he's just been subjected to twenty-eight takes of being shot in the spleen by the much-loved Farmer Hoggett from Babe, James Cromwell. Throughout this ordeal, Spacey maintains such a graciously wisecracking demeanor that everyone on the crew, from lowly grip to lofty costar, seems to float away a little lighter after a few words with him. Call it contact serenity.

Stranger still, Spacey is actually an acerbic kind of guy. But he's really, like, nice about it. Today's shoot, for example takes plce off the courtyard of some sprawling Franklin Avenue manse, a grotto-like stone monstrosity the color of canned salmon. When the owner of the place sidles up to him to boast that the house was designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank, Spacey does a slow pan around the property and smiles beneficently. "Wow," he says, "he must have hated his father."

Amazingly, the proud homeowner laughs along with him. So charmed by the chance to chitchat with a star, he doesn't notice that his home has been verbally leveled. The whole exchange epitomizes, in some weird way, the unique dichotomy of Spacey himself, a psychic split embodied in his very features. Veiwed one way, they look perfectly normal. Viewed another, his very averageness seems so extreme, so hypernaturally bland, as to render him terrifying. It's a composite of a hundred other faces. Keyser Soze and Verbal Kint rolled into one. The perfect mask for an actor.

There's a tense moment, as Spacey rises to stub out his seventh Marlboro Light, when the camper rolls so wildly from side to side that it feels like the Big One has rocked Los Feliz. A passing garbage truck, it turns out. But then a thought arises, in that edgy instant: Kevin Spacey would be the ideal human to have onboard in the event of an apocalypse. If he couldn't kindly cadge food and matches from strangers, he could raise an eyebrow, aim one of those patented kill-you-in-a-minute glances, and intimidate the shit out of whoever had the bread and painkillers. Important options in the event of a millennial meltdown.

Over the years-he's 37 now-Spacey has grown more saguine about his looks: "I used to see my mug in dailes and groan. Now I see it and think, 'Hey, you look like an aging Chinese character actress, AND THEY STILL HIRE YOU!'" This inner rift seems to extend outward from his epidermis to his career, his ambitions, and his attitude toward the world at large. We're talking, after all, about the friendly fellow best known for characters of slashing madness, the movie star who'd rather do theater, the Oscar winner whose passion for directing eclipses any discussion of recent roles-not to mention the publie figure who guards his private life with the ferocity of a Secret Service man keeping geeks off the White House lawn.

"Frankly," he says, displaying the world-class sneer that made Swimming With Sharks such a riveting cringe-fest, "my private life is nobody's business. Because 85 percent of people in this world are comfortable sitting on a couch talking about their personal lives, if you choose not to the presumption is that you have something to hide. If you're not a public freak, people assume you're a private one."

In fact, the one subject on which the actor does appear a bit freakish-or at least freakishly enlightened, by Hollywood standards--is artistic community: having the heart and huevos to make one's work not just a vehicle for personal success but for the elevation of all those involved. Case in point is Albino Alligator, first-time screenwriter Christian Forte's brilliantly tormented barroom drama, and our hero's first foray in directordom.

"This film was an opportunity to give someone who has real talent and a real voice the chance to be heard," Spacey says. "Because all these arguments I hear year after year about how 'Oh, there's no writers!' are complete bullshit. There's a lot of really interesting, really talented young writers. What there aren't enough of are producers with balls."

Due out in November, Albino features Faye Dunaway, Matt Dillon, Skeet Ulrich, and Gary Sinise in a work as disturbingly funny and intense as its novice director. Imagine Dog Day Afternoon by way of Waiting for Godot--a high-wire morality tale that unfolds one night in a New Orleans dive--and you get a hint. It's an amazing stretch of ocelluloid for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is director Spacey's own devotion to the mammoth task of getting it made.

"The day after the Academy Awards, [editor] Per Hallberg and I brought our Oscars to the dubbing stage and we stuck 'em on the console and got to work. We put in a fourteen-hour day. That's how it was...The truth is, as wonderfully eventful as the last year has been, this project is really all I've been thinking about. It's what I kept coming back to."

So total is Spacey's Albino obsession, it's tough sledding trying to extract a word about his other triumphs. To Spacey, all movies exist as footnotes to his existential pride and joy.

"We worked on and off while I was shooting Seven and Outbreak and the producers of A Time to Kill were nice enough to let me work around my production schedule. Even when I was at Cannes, promoting The Usual Suspects, what I was really doing was taking meetings with producers, talking up Albino in a million hotel rooms. At one point I found myself in the Playboy villa, pitching Bob Weinstein and thinking, 'What the fuck has my world turned into?'

To me it comes down to this: there is nothing about achieving anything, even an Academy Award, that has any value if you can't share it, if you can't take that and parlay it, use it to help get attention for other people, people who deserve it...I think the idea of power for its own sake is incredibly shallow. The only power that matters is the power to give some new voice the break it wouldn't otherwise get."

What makes the actor's attitude even more poignant is the story of his own father, a technical writer in the Valley who died on Christmas Eve three years ago. Going through his effects, his son had an experience as haunting, in its way, as any penned by his heroes Pinter and O'Neill.

"Since my father's been gone, I've had the opportunity to look through his notebooks. And even though we were close, it was like meeting someone I didn't even know. My father was a fiction writer at heart, but he never let anybody read his work while he was alive. He just didn't think it was good enough." Spacey's face, in a shroud of cigarette smoke, settles in an expression halfway between heartbreak and a kind of baffled gratitude. "It's like..." he confides, searching for words, "it's like my father created his own alternate universe. He had all this stuff in his brain--this amazing sense of humor, this love for the twenties and thirties, this awesome style. But no one ever knew. After Albino's finished, I'm going to go through all of his material and see if there's anything I can do."

Whether or not Spacey Senior's unrequited genius ever makes it to light, what's clear is that, if his driven and passionate offspring has his way, no worthy writer will ever have to go without a shot at creative fulfillment. And if it takes winning another Oscar or two to make it happen, for Spacey Junior, that shouldn't be a problem.

By Jerry Stahl; Buzz Magazine, October, 1996