Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey Fowler, better known by his stage name Kevin Spacey, is an American actor, film director, producer, singer and comedian who has resided in the United Kingdom since 2003. He began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s before obtaining supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s that culminated in his first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the neo-noir crime thriller The Usual Suspects, and an Academy Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth26 July 1959
CitySouth Orange, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
The characters created cannot just be a mouthpiece for the writer. When you look at a piece of writing, and it's genuine and it doesn't feel like every character is just a mouthpiece for the writer, but that they've been created in such a way that they're expressing an idea that a writer wants to get across, that's when a story succeeds.
My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.
My job is to interpret. I'm an interpreter. I can add things and bring unique qualities to the role that the writer may not have thought of, but someone else created the fundamental idea.
A couple of clues came my way of what I might be getting myself into when I sat down with a number of actors who had played Richard III in the past. And I was hoping of course, that one of them or all of them were gonna give me the magic key, the secret way in to play Richard III but none of them did that.But every one of them did say the following, "Be careful."
Talent is one thing, it is how you nurture and develop it, and never walk away from it. You can be rich, successful, you win awards, but it can always be better.
What I do is interpret, not create. I may add elements and do something different. That is what is so incredible about theatre. Why do we love it that there are nine Hamletsor six King Lears over two years? We love to watch a different actor attack the same material.
You are not just, "This is the way I play it every night." You are constantly finding new ways in, new attacks, "I want to try it this way. Maybe this scene is affecting that scene. I want to attack this scene differently."
I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
I can't imagine that anyone in Hollywood is sitting around trying to decide what actor is good or right or qualified for a role and is being denied a role because of their political views. I don't think that's the way Hollywood works. We're not living in an era of blacklisting.
I think that when you put yourself, as actors have to do, in other people's shoes, when you have to put on the costume that someone else has worn in their life, it gets much, much harder to be prejudiced against them and even to be - to not try to look at the world in a sense of "I'm not going to judge somebody. I'm going to try to understand who they are and what they're about."
I think that acting is a very humanizing profession.
At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.
I've been around politics a long time. I've seen it at its best and its worst, been at so many events, listened to private conversations versus public speaking, understood the game of it, and in many ways the theatrics.
The most important definition of an actor, the job of the actor, is to serve the writer, not yourself. Way too many actors serve themselves.