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
Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you're both championing a character and you're revolted by them.
I've been trying to take this journey over the last four years of getting away from playing manipulative and villainous characters and playing characters that are affected by what happens to them as opposed to unaffected.
The less you know about me, the easier it is to convince you that I am that character on screen.
I can't judge the characters I play, because it's for the audience to do. What I can try to do is to understand and embody what were they going through? How did they make the decisions they made? That to me is a more interesting way to approach something, rather than saying this person is a villain and that person is this and - because it's not very interesting to play that anyway.
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.
I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it's playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.
It's the way I feel about acting. That we are given clues by a writer about someone's essence or persona and it's our job to try to figure out which of those clues are true, which of clues we decide to follow and which of those clues we think are red herrings, or only in the way another character thinks of that character.
Sometimes you walk away from playing somebody and you think, "Wow that was far as from my own experience as I can possibly be." And sometimes you walk away thinking, "Wow. There are qualities in that character that I didn't realize I had." And those can be both interesting and uncomfortable.
I dont categorize characters into one syllable. These are fully-rounded characters that I dont judge; I just play them.
Im able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.
Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.
I'm a relatively ugly character who's done pretty damn well in film.
Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.
There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.