Kevin Spacey interview: Political animal
After eight years running the Old Vic, Kevin Spacey has done something his critics never expected: made the place a success. He talks to Andrew Todd about battles lost and won – and explains why he's so upset about a Spanish cultural centre- guardian.co.uk
Desk job ... Kevin Spacey in the Old Vic's production of Richard lll. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The quiet Spanish steel town of Avilés is sizzling, but not because of its mills. The Old Vic theatre company is in residence at the city's Niemeyer arts centre and Kevin Spacey is making his Spanish stage debut as Shakespeare's Richard III.
Twenty minutes before curtain up, I am almost capsized by a wave of fans moving in determined unison towards the theatre bar, fanning their throats with theatre programmes. Is Spacey, who has so far survived the ferocious attentions of the British paparazzi, about to be dismembered for souvenirs in the Spanish provinces? The answer, it turns out, is no: the object of their ardour is in fact the daytime soap heartthrob Martín Rivas, one of a sizeable herd of Spanish celebrities keen to be seen in town during this visit.
When I meet Spacey after the day's two shows, he has been on stage for seven hours and is still fizzing with energy. He brushes off the minor annoyances of the local excitement: "I had to flip the bird – in character – at someone trying to take a photo from the stalls. I think I even added 'put it down' to one of Shakespeare's lines." Spacey works the room like a politician (Bill Clinton is an old friend), charming his local producers, backslapping his fellow actors, gamely pouring glasses of the exquisite local cider from a great height. There is something doglike about him: he lolls, prowls, wags his tail, plays around, but there is always a slight sense of danger. You get the feeling he enjoys marshalling the possibilities this shapeshifting energy gives him.
In this case the charm is ambassadorial: he has a political message he wants to get across. Why touch down on this international tour in Avilés, I ask. The town is small, industrial and awkwardly situated on the northwest edge of Spain. "Well, everyone expects us to be in Barcelona or Madrid. By coming here instead, maybe we help put the Niemeyer centre on the map and that is exactly what we should be up to."
The centre is something of a pet project for Spacey: he's one of its cultural ambassadors (along with personalities such as Woody Allen, Stephen Hawking and Paulo Coelho), and has followed its conception closely with its director Natalio Grueso, travelling to Brazil to meet its legendary, eponymous, 103-year-old architect Oscar Niemeyer during the design process, visiting the construction site and attending the opening concert by Woody Allen's New Orleans jazz band.
But there is a currently a dark shadow over the centre: having opened its doors just nine months ago, and sold out every event in its first season, it's been forced to close because of a row between the board and the rightwing regional government. The locals, who have benefited from a huge increase in tourism during tough times, are up in arms, and Spacey is ready to wade into the fight. "A million people have visited Avilés since the centre opened. Now the regional government is saying it's not showing enough Asturian culture or they just don't like it – but alright, fine, don't make the cultural argument guys, make the economic argument. If you decide to halt or delay or make it difficult for this centre to continue, I think you will have a revolt on your hands from the local community and businesses, and I think you'll get booted out of office."
There is steel in his eyes. But why should one of the planet's biggest stars want to roll up his sleeves for an issue like this? The answer might lie closer to home in Waterloo, where he has quietly worked for the last decade resuscitating not just the Old Vic but the changing corner of south London it inhabits.
"Bringing life to a neighbourhood, to a community, is always what I wanted to do as artistic director of the Old Vic," he explains. "It's not enough to be a world-renowned theatre with a great history and reputation; we should also be involved in our community, become a place where people feel that they have a stake in it. We receive no public funding, so our outreach in education, workshops and subsidised tickets for local kids, our involvement in new writing, is not box-ticking but absolutely sincere, and I believe that it has transformed people's perspective of the Old Vic."
The artistic perspective has certainly shifted. After some extraordinarily fallow years in which the theatre was forced to close its doors after a disastrous production of Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues, Spacey's stock is high. These days he's lauded as an artistic director, not just as an actor.
I first got to know Spacey in 2003, when he was about to be appointed artistic director and it's interesting to see his growth, and also the roots of his current success in his early ambition. I was called in as an architect to advise him on how the Old Vic could be transformed into unexpected formats such as promenade and thrust. We spent an afternoon fiddling with a large model of the auditorium (with a hole cut into the stage so he could poke his head through and see the space from the actor's perspective). I asked him if he wanted to know how much it would cost. "Shut up," he said.
Of course the project fell foul of the Old Vic's need to sell almost all of its 1,000 seats to stay afloat, but it was resurrected four years later when director Matthew Warchus asked if he could stage Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests trilogy in the round.
Back in 2003 Spacey was best known for his barnstorming film performances in The Usual Suspects, Se7en and American Beauty, and was received with a certain sniffiness in London as an invading Hollywood celebrity attempting to compete with publicly funded "quality" theatres. Less known to the general public was his core identity as a theatre animal who thrived on the energy of live performance, redefining roles such as Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. He was also obviously ambitious to break the formal mould of this theatre, and willing to trade on his star power for fundraising to get things done.
The man standing before me now sipping cider seems much more rounded, confident and warm than the slightly edgy character I encountered seven years ago; the darkness which he put to such memorable use in his film career has diminished, in person at least. And he is now in a position to take further risks, to trade his stock as he prepares to leave the Old Vic in four years' time.
Last year he took the lease on a sprawling, damp, noisy complex of tunnels under Waterloo station, now named the Old Vic Tunnels and under the direction of Hamish Jenkinson. "There is something about giving an audience an experience that's not a typical theatre experience," Spacey says. "We can do that in the Tunnels: we can have plays where an audience moves around with the actors, they can also sit in regular seats; we can also do music events, film screenings and parties. It's such a unique experience to be sitting in these old, dark, damp, wet tunnels with the sounds of the trains coming into Waterloo station – something completely different from our main space, even though we can now metamorphose the Old Vic into other shapes."
He hopes they will be a legacy project extending beyond his tenure at the Old Vic. "My hope is that whoever takes over my role as artistic director in 2015, besides bringing new artistic blood, will be able to build on what we've done, especially in the Tunnels. I get a lot of the attention, but the truth is my job has just been to bring the right elements together – the right director, designer, actors, writer and so on. I'm proudest of all of the new talent we have nurtured – people who began their careers with us and have now gone on to run places like the Donmar and become friendly competitors to get the best new work."
Judging by the show that's accompanying Richard III in Spain, Cart Macabre, Spacey is being as good as his word. It's an immersive piece by the young Living Structures company, and was spawned in the Old Vic Tunnels last year. The audience is wheeled into darkness on individual gurneys, manipulated by performers into enclosed carts, which then dock to a series of environments ranging from visual art and live installations to shadow-play and the protrusion of naked bums, and concludes with the carts being spun in a ring past nightmarish scenes. It is part fairground ride, part hollow Beckettian laughter against the void. Spacey grins. "I love the fact that they're yelling into your face, 'Don't try to fucking figure it out, you dumbass, just accept it!'"
I realise that throughout our conversation he has been an able salesman, political animal and advocate of his projects, but has successfully maintained a veil over himself, kept up his reputation as a rather enigmatic person. How, then, does he feel about London after the battering he has received through to his current success? Is the Old Vic his only home, or does he feel properly rooted in Britain?
"If you'd asked me that question seven years ago, I might have said it's an assignment I've decided to take on. But now it has become the most important aspect of my life. Living in London has become incredible. I suppose it's easy to love where you live if you love what you're doing. But this is not just a visit: it's my home."
• Richard III is at the Grand Theatre in Beijing 11–13 November, and continues the international tour until January 2012. More details on the Old Vic website
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