This is how good an actor Kevin Spacey is:
In praising his performance in the new comedy-drama “American Beauty,” reviewers have marveled at Spacey’s transformation from the flabby, droopy Lester Burnham who begins the movie to the muscle-bound version he becomes. Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum dubbed the physique change ” `Raging Bull’ in reverse.”
The thing is, “American Beauty” was shot out of sequence, with scenes from early and late in the movie often filmed on the same day.
“We would shoot early Lester schmo stuff in the morning and then later Lester buff,” the 40-year-old actor said at a downtown gourmet restaurant where he was grabbing quick sips of soup between an afternoon post-screening Q&A at the University of Chicago and a reception to follow that evening’s “Beauty” preview at McClurg Court. “I had to get in the best shape possible because we were shooting all over the map, and they had a very short schedule because of my schedule. So you just create the early Lester with costumes and makeup and posture.”
Jumping back and forth was especially tricky because Spacey and theater-turned-film director Sam Mendes wanted Lester’s physical, emotional and spiritual evolution to occur so “organically” that it would be imperceptible. Spacey never wants you to see the acting behind the acting, and he rarely wants to you to see the actor either.
His spate of appearances to promote “American Beauty” is against type for Spacey, who has remained an elusive figure since first reaching wide audiences a dozen years ago as the sister-loving criminal Mel Profitt on television’s “Wise Guy.” He has preferred to let his work do the talking.
“I’ve always thought that the less we know about actors, the better off,” he said. “I’ve just always been somebody who really didn’t want to give the magic away. I loved it when I used to be able to go to a theater and just the lights would go down, and that light would go across your head, and you’d be taken to a world. And if you believed those people and you didn’t come armed with an enormous amount of baggage about who they were, then you went into that world.”
Then again, Spacey has the gift of gab. Get him talking about his work, and the words pour out with the enthusiasm of a man who loves his job and knows why.
Still, Spacey, who grew up in Southern Calfornia and lives in Manhattan, reveals almost nothing about his day-to-day life — not that you blame him. He’s already been the victim of an Esquire cover story that made unsubstantiated insinuations about his sexual orientation, as if the topic were anyone’s business. If anything, you fear Spacey might diminish himself by what he’s already felt compelled to reveal, such as his assertion of his heterosexuality to Playboy magazine and his newfound sexual jokiness, including a reference at the University of Chicago to the kissing ability of “Beauty” co-star Mena Suvari that had the young actress blushing.
Spacey is more at home discussing what he knows and does best: acting, acting and acting.
“I have been — over the last four years to be exact — making very incremental steps toward trying to do something in film that I had not been afforded the chance to do before,” he said. “I got known for a series of rather dark and mysterious and manipulative kinds of characters that explored a really interesting terrain, but I realized that the impression had been laid rather deeply. So I thought if I want to not get pigeonholed, if I want to start just experiencing things I haven’t experienced and go to places that maybe people don’t think I can go to, then I’d better start doing something about it.”
One reason Spacey is willing to feed the media machine this time is that he rightly considers “American Beauty” a breakthrough. Acting out the flawed Lester’s spiritual reawakening is the culmination of a progression from indelibly creepy roles (his Oscar-winning turn as Verbal Kint in “The Usual Suspects,” his uncredited serial killer in “Seven”) to more fleshed-out, still-troublesome characters (Jack Vincennes in “L.A. Confidential,” Jim Williams in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”) to his acclaimed performance as the salesman Hickey in London and Broadway productions of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Filming of “Beauty” was squeezed in between the two productions.
“I could never have done this movie if I hadn’t done `Iceman Cometh’ first, because what that play and that experience, that camaraderie, that ensemble taught me about fellowship and about communication and friendship and the nature of our relationship to each other, that spirit was informing everything about `American Beauty,’ ” he said. “And I’m enormously grateful to it. The experience was so sublime, and it was everything I ever dreamed theater could be on every single level that I walked into `American Beauty’ with a very close understanding of what Lester reaches or is reaching for at least. I know that was just in me. It’s not something you act; it’s something you feel.”
During the conversation, his eyes often wandered upward to the windows where people were walking past the basement-level restaurant. Occasionally he waved at someone who recognized him.
“I’m wondering whether someone’s going to press something against the window at some point, be rude,” he said as a jazz saxophone version of “Love and Marriage” played in the background. He added with a Groucho inflection: “Frankly, it would liven this place up.”
In a sense, fan feedback has been Spacey’s gauge that he’s on the right track. He said he routinely refuses requests to tape on-camera interviews in costume because that footage invariably is cut together with actual film footage to blur the lines between actor and character. Everyday fans, he added, have less trouble making that distinction.
“A great many times people when they come up to me or when I get letters, they talk about the characters as if they’re three-dimensional, fully embodied human beings,” Spacey said. “They talk about what those characters did, by name, and not what I did. That for me is the closest I can get to know that I’ve gotten toward serving a writer and serving a story. That’s when I know I’ve gotten close, because when you can convince people that that person is a real person, then that’s what the job is: to convince people you’re somebody else for a couple of hours.”
One reason Spacey is so convincing is that his acting relies more on subtle turns than flashy gestures. For example, watch the dinner-table fight in “Beauty” to see how Spacey takes Lester from explosive anger to self-satisfied amusement through just a flicker of the eyes and a few minor shifts of body language.
To him, the most misunderstood aspect of acting is that a performance is simply a matter of capturing a spontaneous moment rather than the result of extensive fine-tuning. The considerations at any point for Spacey may include: “Is this scene supposed to be funny and how do we take care of the comedy? What is that about? What are the emotional and intellectual things that you have to address, and what is the technical stuff that you have to be able to do at the same time to make it all look like it’s just happening? . . .
“Acting is about trying to hone something toward the best possible way to reveal what the writer is trying to say, and that’s an interpretive art. I’m not the original artist. I’m the interpreter.”
At the same time, he does find himself living through characters, especially Lester and his quest to appreciate the beauty in the everyday.
“I think that it’s about capturing moments; it’s about allowing yourself to have moments where you recognize that there is something far more important and far greater to reach for, and it’s not outside of yourself,” Spacey said. Life “can be like a banquet. It can be this incredibly expressive journey of finding those moments. I think there are moments of great inner peace, and whether they last a lifetime or they last a very brief moment, at least you find them.”
Was he always open to such moments?
“I think that I’ve always tried to have a part of me that’s connected to the child in me. That’s been a big part of my experience, to never lose sight of the 12-to-16-year-old in me, and that’s made for me a really good time because it’s allowed me to not sort of get settled into a kind of routine.”
So although he admitted he’s “having a great time” these days, he’s wary of becoming too comfortable.
“I don’t mind being happy,” Spacey said. “I just don’t want to become content, and I don’t want to stop being challenged. I want to be as energized and as interested in getting up every morning and doing something I haven’t done and working with people that challenge me as I did when I was in high school, in college, and read things and fell in love with them and said, `I have to do this.’ “
SOME TRIVIA ABOUT SPACEY
A few facts you may not know about Kevin Spacey:
– He was expelled from military school for hitting a boy with a tire.
– He went to high school with Val Kilmer and Mare Winningham.
– Early in his career, he tried stand-up comedy but was rejected at an audition for “The Gong Show.”
– He worked on Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, wrote speeches for Illinois congressman John Anderson’s 1980 presidential bid and still works behind the scenes for various candidates.
– His first movie role was as an orange-haired subway mugger who winks obnoxiously at Meryl Streep in Mike Nichols’ “Heartburn” (1986).
