The Guardian, September 24, 1997

Kevin Spacey, an actor and his masks

I expect to be disconcerted by Kevin Spacey. It is, after all, what he does so well on screen. But not like this. The day before we meet, I am looking through pictures of the actor-turned-director. Stacks of them. But, walking into the room 24 hours later, I don't even recognize the man.

A half-smoked cigar the size of a baby's arm lies on the coffee table of the hotel suite, and Spacey is pacing around with a stiff-legged gait that's more John Wayne than Verbal Kint (the geeky cripple/criminal mastermind he played in "The Usual Suspects," a role for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar).

The poster for that film showed a police­identity parade. Five men stand against a height chart, with puny Verbal measuring up at about 5­foot 8. By the end of the film, his Deputy Dawg face and hangdog physique have become a visual shorthand for the banality of evil.

It's only when you meet him that you realize what a consummate piece of acting this is. Because in the flesh, Spacey looks bigger: taller and chunkier. His features are more regular, face rounder, eyes wider and translucent blue. In fact, he looks quite alarmingly all­American, a long­lost cousin of Tom Hanks.

"Kevin is a chameleon,"' says Bryan Singer, director of "The Usual Suspects."

"He's very complex and deliberate in both his acting and his presentation of himself as an individual. There's great thought behind every word that comes out of his mouth."

Or not, if you believe Spacey himself.

"I've seen Bryan say things like that. I have argued with him about that," he counters. "You see I just don't agree with him that I'm complex. The characters I play are complex..."' At which point he offers his best "Honest John" shrug and smile, and the elastic band he's been fiddling with chooses this moment theatrically to snap in two.

Justified or not, the aura of complexity that hangs around Spacey is compounded by the fact that no one really knows a lot about him. Even the origin of the name "Spacey" is vigorously debated on the Internet. One theory is that it was once a nickname based on a certain spaced­out, space cadet­ish quality. Another theory says that it's a conflation of the name of one of his heroes, Spencer Tracy.

Once in a blue moon, you come across the kind of Spacey­related inconsequential, gossipy tidbit that for other Hollywood stars would be a commonplace. Kevin apparently likes to go dancing — he was seen hoofing it up with Sandra Bullock while making "A Time To Kill."

Young Kevin left Northridge Military Academy under a cloud after hitting a fellow child with a tire. Kevin was in high school with Val Kilmer ("One of the funniest people I've ever known — he does a great Marlon Brando impression"). Or, indeed, Kevin is a great fan of T.S. Eliot.

What we do know is that he lives in a two­bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village with his labrador, a recovered stray called Legacy. And that is about as intimate as it gets.

Inevitably — as happens to any Hollywood star who has never married, especially one who takes his mother with him to the Oscars — fans have pondered whether Spacey is gay. "I don't really know about that sort of speculation," he says. "That happens about so many people. It doesn't really bother me."

Mystery is essential to his appeal, though it's not, he insists, mystery for its own sake.

"We live in a world in which the scope of information about people has become very vast, where more and more people offer up anecdotes about their own lives. We also live in a world in which most actors play themselves. So the distinction between characters and actors has become blurred. For me, it's most important that I keep the integrity of the characters I play in films."

And yet, before he was a star, he didn't give much away either. At the age of 19, he spent some time as a stand­up in Los Angeles clubs. Now that, you imagine, must have been revealing: cannibalizing his life for the sake of his act. Apparently not. "Actually, I was doing a lot of impressions," he says, "Johnny Carson, James Stewart..."

It comes as no surprise to discover that at the Juilliard drama school in New York, his favorite classes were those that involved the use of masks, "because when you put a mask on your face you can see the world but the world can't see you."

The movie with which he's chosen to make his directorial debut adds to this air of studied anonymity. First movies are often autobiographical, but Spacey has gone for a cool, emotionally distanced genre piece: the small­scale hostage movie.

"Albino Alligator" (by first­time scriptwriter Christian Forte) finds bungling burglars Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise and Russell Crowe holing themselves up in a New Orleans bar with barmaid Faye Dunaway and others, trying to work out how to beat the police blockade.

It's about, he says, "what anyone is willing to do in order to survive, that we don't really know what the person next to us is capable of" — themes that, he observes, he also explored in "Seven" (as the serial killer) and "Swimming With Sharks," in which he gave a very funny portrayal of a bullying Hollywood studio executive kidnapped by a bullied employee."

As for slipping out of frame entirely and behind the camera, "It was very attractive just to be the storyteller."

Spacey laughs a lot. He appears amazingly relaxed. But things haven't always been that way. "From 1982 to 1984, I just didn't sleep," he told an interviewer recently. "I could not ... relax. I would just stay up, coming up with plans how I was gonna make it."

He collected old cans in a shopping trolley to pay for dog food and found relief from his worries by reading biographies of great screen actors — Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy. Life was all right, he concluded, because none of them got star billing until they were in their thirties (he is now 38).

Four years later he was still as torn up as ever. A tart passage in Richard E. Grant's film diaries, "With Nails," describes how Grant and Spacey go to see "Batman" in Paris during the making of "Henry And June" in 1989: "He (Spacey) is on a rant because he didn't get any close­ups during his scene and has been in heated consultation with his agent and manager. The irony is that he is playing a man who is ferociously frustrated with his artistic lot in life."

Looking back, how would he describe himself, then? "The word obsessive would not be over­reaching," he offers. "It's a stage many actors go through."

When he first came to New York he became fixated on Al Pacino's performance in "American Buffalo," watching it over and over again (The two men later became friends, Pacino helping him get a part in the film of David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross," as well as casting him in "Looking For Richard.").

It's impossible to say whether the private Spacey is still quite as intense today. But if he has anything to do with it, the screen persona (malcontent, psycho, small man struggling to contain large and unpleasant emotions) is due for a change.

"There's this feeling I have where I'll read a part and maybe it's a powerful, powerful person just defending their position. I never play those roles in the theater. I don't want to play characters that are hermetically sealed. I want to play characters who aren't manipulative. I want to play characters who are vulnerable."

He says it with such steeliness, you don't doubt for a minute he'll succeed.

The Guardian, September 24, 1997