There aren’t many people who can command a room by simply walking into it. With his reddish chambray button-down shirt, grey suit, Boston Strong woven bracelet, and a backpack of tennis rackets, Kevin Spacey is the epitome of cool.
Swiftly walking to our table, he sets his bag down and looks each of us in the eye as if to imply that these next twenty minutes are going to be both enlightening and fun. During our conversation, I notice that his answers aren’t just responses, they are stories, each one more vivid and colorful than the next. Even off camera, or stage, in this case, Kevin Spacey is a storyteller at heart, engaging and captivating our intimate roundtable, talking to us as if we are his fellow champions rather than “critics.” Spacey plays the devilish Richard III in the Sam Mendes directed play NOW, and it’s for this reason why we’re gathered together today. As excited as I am to hear about Spacey’s experience traveling cross-country with a theater troupe performing one of Shakespeare’s most notable works, there is so much more I wish I could ask him about his entire career (although I don’t think his team would allow me the required twenty hours to do so). We do manage, however, to get in a few good questions about Francis Underwood and House of Cards, and the stories don’t stop. We begin:
WHEN YOU DECIDED TO DO THIS PRODUCTION AND TAKE IT AROUND THE WORLD, AT WHAT POINT DID THE IDEA OF DOING A DOCUMENTARY COME INTO PLAY?
The conversations started a little bit with Sam Mendes [play director] in the first year of The Bridge Project. There were 3 seasons where Sam directed 5 productions… Richard III was the final. We started talking in the first season, I think it was probably after I went to Epidaurus to watch Simon Russell Beal do The Winter’s Tale and I was like, ‘Oh my God, whatever we do, we have to bring it to this theater. This is the most unbelievable theater.’ And then I said, ‘Maybe there’s a way we can capture this experience’ because… it’s probably been about 35 or more years since a theater company has gone around the world and done this kind of tour. It just isn’t done anymore. So then Jeremy [Director]… came to me and said ‘I think you should document this’ and I was like that’s exactly what Sam and I have been talking about. I was quite reluctant about what “it” was going to be, to give parameters and say ‘this is what we’re trying to do,’ it was more like ‘Just fucking capture it!’
When I was shooting last season on House of Cards, Jeremy and our editor came to Baltimore and for 11 weeks we cut what is now the film.
WAS THERE A PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT FOR THE ACTORS TO GET USED TO THE CAMERAS?
There were some at the very beginning, like Gemma Jones, never wanted the camera in her face. She was like ‘Get that fucking thing out of my face.’ She was very clear about it. But, as time went on, she started to get to know Jeremy and she likes the boys as you get from the film. So she started to soften up and then by the time we’re halfway through she’s lifting up her skirt.
[Laughter]
Also, people didn’t know what it was for. It was never like, ‘Ok this is going to be a PBS documentary, or it’s gonna be on HBO… we just literally didn’t know how it was going to end up being and then how it was going to end being distributed if at all. It could have been just a very expensive home movie.
DID YOU FILM THE PLAY IN ITS ENTIRITY?
It wasn’t designed that way… and it wasn’t what we set out to do.
WHAT ABOUT THE EPIDAURUS EXPERIENCE?
I have to say the Epidaurus experience was unparalled; no experience I ever had in a theater has ever been quite like it. To rehearse in that space over a number of days was quite remarkable, but it’s a very, very different venue when it’s empty than when it’s full. The first time I saw it full was when, well, we had to wait for it to get really dark, it was like 9:15 at night when we could actually start the play. Also because you can’t get 14,000 people down to the bathrooms in less than 2 hours- there was no intermission in Epidaurus, we did it straight through. I remember I was backstage and the green light goes on and that’s your cue to walk out the door, and I remember I scurried across the stage and sat down in the chair and I went like this…
[Slowly raises his head towards the sky]
And I went [giant gasp] ‘ohhhhh fuck.’
[Laughter]
And Sam Mendes said to me after that performance, ‘Oh my god, it was the most terrifying thing to watch you for like the first half hour because you were like, breathing for four people. Literally, I looked up and it was like a wall of people, a human wall that went as far as you could fucking see.
It took us 2 performances to learn how to play that space. I guess I should explain that the difference in playing different theaters is that it’s all about how you hear your own voice. That’s what acoustics are. Acoustics are about measuring how much energy and vocal power you need to be heard and the only way you can measure that is when you hear your voice back. The audience sucks up a lot of that vocal power but in a place like Epidaurus, which has been built by geniuses, the human voice can carry all the way to the top. I had friends who came and, one night, sat very close and sat at the very top the next night and said they could hear better up there than the could [up close].
YOU’VE WORKED WITH SAM MENDES BOTH IN THEATER AND ON FILM, DOES HE CHANGE HIS DIRECTORIAL STYLE WITH THESE DIFFERENT MEDIUMS?
What was great about Sam when we first worked together was, even though American Beauty was his first film, he took the best of theater and applied it to making a movie. So we rehearsed it for 2 weeks like a play with the entire cast. Everybody was there, no matter how big or small the parts were. We taped all the sets out on this big soundstage and we rehearsed every single scene, so by the time we got to the set, we knew what we were doing. We had answered the big questions. We were ready to work and discover it on film. [Sam] is also one of those rare directors who not only give you a great direction, but they know when to give you that great direction. There are times when I would have been doing something for weeks in a particular way and then in the third preview Sam would go, ‘I think tonight we try it this way, I don’t think the way you’ve been doing it is right’ and I’d go, ‘Well didn’t you fucking tell me that sooner!’ He’d be like, ‘It’s because you wouldn’t have been able to take the note 6 weeks ago, but now you can. You understand more now than you did then.’ It’s about a director watching how actors are developing and shifting and changing and when they’re ready for a note, he brilliantly knows how to give it to you.
IT’S NOT UNTIL I SAW THIS MOVIE THAT I REALIZED THERE IS A CORRALATION BETWEEN FRANCIS UNDERWOOD [HOUSE OF CARDS] AND…
Not just a correlation! Michael Dobbs [author of the original novel] based the character of Francis on Richard III. That’s why direct address exists in House of Cards. I know a lot of people think Ferris Bueller created direct address…
[Laughter]
But he didn’t. There’s a guy named William Shakespeare and he invented direct address in this play. That’s why, for me, it was this amazing circumstance that I closed this play in March of 2012 and on April 28th, I started shooting House of Cards. I cannot tell you what that meant for me in terms of how I approached House of Cards.
DO YOU THINK YOU COULD HAVE DONE HOUSE OF CARDS WITHOUT COMING OFF OF RICHARD III?
I don’t think I could have done House of Cards if I haven’t spent the last 10 years doing theater. Absolutely… There is no doubt that both of these characters are investigations into the quarters of power, into the nature of power, and that they’re both characters that have such a remarkable ability to predict the way someone will respond, that they’re able to be 16 moves ahead in the chess game. That’s why they generally get what they want.
When it came time for me to start doing the direct addresses in House of Cards, the memory of that relationship [during Richard III] was so burned in me, that it really helped me because now I’m just looking down the barrel of a lens. I don’t have eyes. I’ve had to make a slight adjustment from thinking of so many people to just trying to think of my best friend whoI’m telling things to that I wouldn’t tell anyone.
ONE THING I REALLY APPRECIATED WAS THE NOWNESS, BEING IN THE PRESENT. DO YOU FIND THEATER THERAPEUTIC BEING JUST SO IN THE MOMENT?
Yeah. Let me put it to you this way, one of the reasons why I wanted to make the movie was that a lot of times over the last few years people looked at me like a really confused puppy. Like, ‘Why do you do theater?’ Here’s what’s incredible about the comparisons between the experiences for an actor. Theater is organic. Film is not. Theater, you come everyday and work with a group of people and you all get to do the whole thing every night. In film, you work in 2-3 minute bits and it’s never in chronological order, and then someone takes that away and makes it look like it all happened, or that you gave that performance. But you might have given that performance in one take that way, another take that way and the way they put it all together makes it look like you did it.
For all those people who think [theater] must all be the same, I often use the analogy of tennis. If you go out and play tennis for 8 nights, yeah it’s the same rules, but it’s a different game every time you’re out on that court. You’re working on a different part of your game and your partner is working on another part of their game. You add to that the act of being watched, and that changes it.
Theater is alive and it is now. And then it’s gone.
Another thing I remember, is that no matter how good I may be in a movie, I’ll never be any better. It’s frozen. But in theater, I can be better tomorrow night. The journey you go through as an actor is incredible.
