INTERVIEW:International film star, international theatre impresario and international man of mystery Kevin Spacey has found time in his busy schedule to produce a nippy little thriller, but theatre - and his dog, Minnie - remain his first loves 'I had seen some people get famous in their early 20s and make mistakes. I didn't want that. I never went mad with money and I never let it corrupt me', writes Donald Clarke
'OH, SO THIS IS the famous dog!" The words are out of my stupid, fat mouth before I have time properly to consider their potential impact. If life were governed by the rules of situation comedy, Kevin Spacey and his sleek publicist would, at this point, raise their hands to shoulder height and recoil in theatrical horror. Neither, in fact, shows any emotion, but this doesn't stop me babbling manically like Basil Fawlty trying to wriggle out of a particularly clumsy lie.
"The dog that's always in the interviews," I improvise. "I have read lots of interviews with you and Minnie is always in the room. When I said famous, I meant famous because she's always in the interviews." Three years ago, Minnie, a small black thing with very decent manners, gained a sliver of celebrity as a bit player in an extraordinary little drama that had the tabloids sniggering for days.
The actor, who has lived in London since 2003, had, it seems, lent his telephone to some bloke while walking Minnie in the park. When the stranger legged it, Kevin made to pursue him, got caught up in the dog's lead and fell painfully to the ground.
So what? Such things happen. Well, yes, but the fact that the incident took place at four o'clock in the morning encouraged many to, once again, ask questions about Kevin's sexuality. He did once tell Playboy magazine that he was straight, but that has not stopped large sections of the public from thinking otherwise.
"I can only tell you that things that people who I do not know might say about me are of no consequence to me," Spacey says. "Things that are written that are not true do not even come up on my radar. Assessment, judgment, criticisms, reviews: that's all fine. Everybody has their opinion. That's fine. Mind you, I don't read reviews when I am in a play."
Really? A lot of actors say they don't read reviews, but we all suspect they're fibbing.
"No, I really don't. If I am in a play, then I am in the middle of something that involves a stream of consciousness. Even a good review can get in the way of that."
If ever there were an actor who emanated control and restraint, it would be Mr Spacey. Like so many of the characters he has played on film - the corrupt detective in LA Confidential, the serial killer in Se7en, the imploding middle-aged suburbanite in American Beauty - Kevin seems a stranger to undisciplined displays of emotion. This, perhaps, explains why so many otherwise serious people seem interested in the details of his romantic life. It is quite difficult to imagine a person of either gender breaking through Spacey's shiny carapace and grabbing hold of the flesh within.
Perched upon a sofa in London's Soho Hotel, Minnie sleeping peacefully at his side, Spacey speaks in a disconcertingly ordered monotone. He has made the considerable mistake of donning the sort of hat - part beret, part reversed cap - that only Samuel L Jackson can wear without inviting titters, but otherwise Kevin, now 48, looks every inch the buttoned-up, middle-aged intellectual.
Spacey spends most of his week running the historic Old Vic Theatre in London's Waterloo, but, at some point in the last year, he found time to produce a nippy little thriller entitled 21. The film, based on a true story, follows a group of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who utilised their mathematical gifts to make a fortune at the blackjack tables of Las Vegas. Spacey turns up as the students' (you've guessed it) ordered, disciplined tutor. Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth play two of the students. Oddly, considering the producer's cerebral inclinations, 21 - which is directed by the man who gave us Legally Blonde - is a lightweight, mainstream affair.
"Absolutely. I always thought this movie had commercial potential when I first started hearing rumours about the original story. I could never quite figure out if it was an urban myth or not." Spacey sees elements of Risky Business, the 1980s comedy in which Tom Cruise partied heartily, in the finished product.
"Yes, that's right," he says. "I always saw it as a crowd-pleaser. I saw it as a morality tale as well. It's about a young guy who gets money in an unconventional way and then we watch as the money changes him."
I wonder if this is a problem Kevin had to deal with. He was certainly no teenager when he began appearing in the gossip magazines, but, like every actor who brushes up against celebrity, he must have been tempted by the fleshpots.
"Well, as you say, I wasn't all that young when it happened," he muses. "Fortunately, I had been able to watch people I knew very well who had been in the same position. I had seen some people get famous in their early 20s and make mistakes. I didn't want that. I never went mad with money and I never let it corrupt me.
"I have always been pretty good at maintaining a level head. I had great parents who raised me right. I feel the need to use success responsibly. What is your response to success? Well, mine has been to come to London and start a theatre company."
Kevin Fowler was born in South Orange, New Jersey, to a theatre-loving mother - Kevin later adopted her maiden name - and a father of reputed eccentricity. Some years back, Kevin's brother, Randall Fowler, who earns his living impersonating Rod Stewart, announced that their dad, variously a journalist and a technical writer, was a member of the American Nazi party and had trimmed his moustache to resemble that of Adolf Hitler. The old man, Randall suggested, savagely abused the whole family and caused Kevin to withdraw into a kind of permanent psychological retreat. "(Kevin) was so determined to avoid the whippings, that he just minded his Ps and Qs until there was nothing inside. He had no feelings," Randall said.
Spacey's representatives cautiously denied the reports and the actor now makes a point of praising his father at every opportunity. Both parents were, he tells me, hugely supportive of his decision to work in the theatre.
"Very much so. My parents were unbelievably supportive. My mother used to drive me to acting classes twice a week. They both came to everything I did. They consistently turned up to see the plays when I was studying at Julliard. Right up to my mother's death a few years ago, they came to all the plays." So, Kevin Spacey may have been - may have been, mind - raised by a harsh, domineering father and a sensitive, doting mother who adored the theatre. It is hard to imagine circumstances more archetypically suited to producing a man of the stage.
Following a few minor outbreaks of juvenile delinquency, Spacey was sent away to military school, but was eventually expelled for walloping a fellow student with a tyre. "It was self-defence," he later claimed. Before he received his dishonourable discharge, Spacey had, however, been encouraged to take a drama course. He acted throughout high school and, upon graduation, made his way to the hugely prestigious Juilliard School in New York City.
Spacey slugged away in the theatre for a decade before the great Alan J Pakula offered him a significant movie role in 1992's Consenting Adults. That film was not a success, but, the same year, he shone alongside Jack Lemmon, an early mentor, in a fine film version of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. He now officially had That Guy status - as in "you know, That Guy who was in Such-and-such" - but, in 1995, characteristically oily performances in Se7en and The Usual Suspects solidified his singular celebrity.
I wonder when he was first reassured that he could really make a living in the business. Was it when he got into Juilliard? Was it his first lead role? Maybe he didn't feel secure until he won the Oscar for The Usual Suspects? "I never doubted at all," he says with disconcerting assurance.
"If you ever doubt, then you are in trouble. I never thought: I should do this or that in case I don't make it. I never had a back-up plan. And I started to make a living as an actor in plays reasonably quickly. Eventually, film opened up for me. I think maybe you have to have blinders on - be really focused - or you will never make it."
Yikes! Spacey exhibits the sort of flinty confidence you would expect from an inter-war dictator or a Renaissance architect. It's hard to imagine him ever experiencing attacks of self-doubt. Mind you, it does take a particular type of determination to attain stardom without the benefits of a conventionally pretty face. When Spacey launched himself into his career, he must, surely, have had ambitions to be the leading man. Few actors set out with the intention of cornering the market for simpering maniacs and repressed wage-slaves.
"I wanted to be a working actor," he counters. "That's really all I wanted. Look, I am basically a character actor who somehow did very well in film, but who generally plays in ensemble movies. I am not a movie star in the sense that Brad Pitt is. I am just not that guy. And I had to fight and work hard to carve that career in film. Alan Pakula had to really fight to get me into a studio movie. I am grateful. That is not necessarily something I expected."
Spacey then goes on to assert his continuing undiluted affection for the theatre. You hear this sort of stuff a lot from actors. You hear it particularly often from former Home and Away beach bums reduced to playing Aladdin at the Bognor Hippodrome. But nobody can doubt that Spacey is sincere. For the last five years, he has been running a theatre company at the Old Vic Theatre (original home of Lawrence Olivier's Royal Shakespeare Company) in the gloomy streets south of Waterloo Station.
Many cynics felt that Spacey might hightail it back to New York if the going got choppy, but he has proved admirably dedicated to his task. His first few presentations got terrible reviews and Robert Altman's version of Resurrection Blues, an obscure Arthur Miller play, was so awful it closed months early. Still, Spacey showed no signs of bolting. Recent productions of Shakespeare's Richard II, Mamet's Speed the Plow and Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten have received raves and secured the company's reputation.
"I am not saying there weren't times when it was frustrating. After a few months, people were saying our company wasn't viable and you really need to give a venture like that months before judging."
What about the difficult business of moving so far from home? Even the gleaming, cool machine that is the Kev-bot must miss something from the United States. "I suppose mostly I miss some friends," he allows. I moved around a lot as a child, so that prepared me. I think what happens is that everywhere I go, rather than pining for stuff, I just make that place home." So cool. So controlled. So Kevin.
I suspect it might be easier to spur little old Minnie into an emotional breakdown.