So Kevin Spacey is homeless now. No, he’s not quite on the streets – he’s ‘living in hotels… living in Airbnbs’, he said in an interview this week. He’s basically a thespian hobo, going wherever there might be scraps of work for a one-time Oscar winner who fell from fame with such a deafening thud in the #MeToo era. ‘I literally have no home, that’s what I’m attempting to explain’, he said. It’s quite the plunge for the man who once made $500k per episode for his superbly acidic turn as the ruthless president in House of Cards.
It’s time to let Kevin Spacey back in. He’s been skulking in the moral wilderness long enough. He has not been found guilty of a single one of the accusations of sexual misconduct made against him. It’s a crime against the presumption of innocence that he is still forced to stalk that purgatory of suspicion to which so many men were damned in the #MeToo years. Worse, it’s dumb – Hollywood has rarely been in such dire need of the brilliance, the cunning and the sheer amorality with which Spacey darkened our screens before his fall.
Spacey’s was the most prominent scalp claimed during #MeToo – that febrile time of a million pointed fingers when accusation alone was enough to destroy a man’s career. Here was a two-time Oscar winner – for American Beauty and The Usual Suspects – being ruthlessly unpersoned. The celebrated star of House of Cards cast out from the cultural realm. House of Cards was revolutionary. It was the first series produced exclusively for Netflix. It invented binge viewing. The man who helped to birth the streaming era is now condemned to bed-surf in other people’s flats as and when a morsel of work appears.
Here’s the thing: he has not been convicted of anything. Nothing. Nada. Some of the accusations against him were serious, especially the first one, when actor Anthony Rapp said Spacey made a drunken pass at him in 1986, when Spacey was 27 and Rapp was just 14. Others were less serious, like those handsy come-ons he allegedly made towards young men at the Old Vic in London where he was artistic director from 2004 to 2015. They were ‘clumsy passes’, Spacey said, and reading the details it’s hard to disagree. Anyway, he was acquitted of all charges – all.
In July 2023, a jury in London acquitted him of nine charges of sexual assault involving four men during the period of 2001 to 2013. Upon the reading of the verdict, Spacey wept and mouthed ‘thank you’ at the jurors. A year earlier, in late 2022, in a civil trial in New York City, a jury decided Spacey ‘did not sexually abuse Anthony Rapp’. They came to their decision with what one reporter called ‘lightning speed’ – it took them just over an hour to rule that Rapp had not proven his case.
So why is Spacey still out in the cold? Civilisation itself pleads with us to accept his innocence. By the virtues of enlightenment, only those fairly convicted of an offence may be subjected to punishment. And yet Spacey, found guilty of nothing, has suffered ceaseless chastisements. He was ruthlessly scrubbed from All the Money in the World in 2017 and all his scenes reshot with Christopher Plummer instead – a literal memory-holing. He was dropped from House of Cards. Even following his acquittals his blacklisting from Hollywood remained in force. Perhaps the rich, preening moralists of the film world think they know better than the little people who sit on juries. Who needs democratic deliberation when we have PR-obsessed producers in their barren LA mansions striking a pen through the names of men that they have judged to be iffy as fuck?
Some people say ‘No smoke without fire’. They say the very number of accusations made against Spacey proves he was up to something. I’m sorry, that’s not how justice in a civilised society works. It is only in tribal societies or under the boot of political tyranny that having a gaggle of noisy finger-pointers is sufficient to condemn a man. In enlightened societies we recognise there is such a thing as the bandwagon effect. We know accusations can pile up from mistakenness or even hysteria. We remember such historic crimes as the Salem witch trials when the high number of accusations was proof not of the girls’ guilt but of their community’s descent into mania. We exercise caution, always, because that most cherished thing is in the balance once an accusation has been made – the liberty of an individual.
The hypocrisy of Hollywood is staggering. It is rammed with woke poseurs who fancy that they would have taken a stand against the blacklisting of suspected Communists during the McCarthyite mania, yet here they are turning a blind eye to the shunning of a great actor that feels every bit as irrational and unjust as the fate that befell the likes of Dalton Trumbo 70 years ago. ‘Is the accuser always holy now?’, asks John Proctor in The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play in which Salem serves as an allegory for that anti-Communist hysteria. ‘Yes’ is Hollywood’s answer today, if its savage ostracism of Spacey is anything to go by.
Hollywood should let Spacey back in not so much to save Spacey but to save itself. The bland, platitudinous hell of modern Hollywood, with its woke remakes of Snow White and its musclebound superhero shite, might just be brought back to life with an injection of Spaceyism. From his shuffling devil in The Usual Suspects to his icy psycho in Se7en, he made amorality an artform, embodying the empty dread of the fin de siècle moment better than pretty much anyone else in Western culture. A Hollywood that has more time for emaciated caterwaulers like Cynthia Erivo than it does for the man who put Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box deserves to die.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
