IIn Kevin Spacey’s written right-of-reply statement at the end of Spacey Unmasked, he reminds the world that every criminal and civil lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault has been decided in his favor. He has the right to repeat this fact. But public opinion has long turned against an actor who was one of the world’s most acclaimed when he won Oscars for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty, but who has been an industry pariah since Netflix fired him from House of cards’ in 2017. This new two-part documentary details further allegations of inappropriate behaviour.
Spacey Unmasked, however, is more than a blizzard of scars on one side of an is-he-isn’t-he ledger. Viewers willing to believe what is claimed in these interviews are given insight into not only whether an A-list actor came to abuse his position, but how.
The program brings together allegations made by 10 men, most in the US, some of whom worked with Spacey when he was director of the Old Vic theater in London. With the exception of one who went to high school with Spacey and another who says he met him in 1981, long before he became famous, all the men make more or less the same accusation: their male influence is made unwanted advances and, at the time, they did not feel able to complain. Only one has spoken publicly before.
We’re shown a familiar picture of Hollywood and the arts/entertainment industry—pre-#MeToo, anyway—as a place where stars are corrupted by being given too much power. When an entire multi-million dollar project hinges on a performer’s ability to attract an audience, a brave junior colleague will accuse him of workplace misconduct. But when the testifiers are men, the problem at the heart of the #MeToo revelations — old-fashioned, rotten misogyny — is absent.
Instead, the secondary issue here is the ongoing stigma of being gay. In the second half of the 1990s, Spacey reached the very top of the acting profession and was not known for romantic leads that would have required him to portray heterosexual men, yet he felt unable to come out. He didn’t do this until 2017, when he was first charged, in a move that was widely criticized by LGBTQ+ commentators who believed he was using his message to deflect criticism. Before that, anyone who accused Spacey of groping them would also call him gay.
One interviewee here claims to have witnessed Spacey viciously taunting two gay men in a bar. Another says that when he rejected the actor’s advances, what really infuriated Spacey was the suggestion that he was gay. The impression given is of a man who has spent his life raging with shame at who he is, with that anger manifesting as abuse. That narrative, and the fact that Spacey made his name playing scheming, self-hating villains, has been turned into a dark tragedy by the appearance of the actor’s brother, Randy, repeating his claim that their late father was a neo-Nazi who beat and oppressed his sons and who repeatedly raped Randy.
That the accusers are all men means that Spacey Unmasked adds something valuable to the wider discussion about sexual misconduct. Get over it, women are often told: What harm does it really do if your boss slyly leans his body against you or puts his hand on your hip when no one is looking? Spacey has never been accused of anything as serious as the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby, or what his brother says their father did. But here we see stereotypically strong men—a boxer, an ex-Marine—expressing how a single negative experience still affects them deeply psychologically, years later. Anyone tempted to dismiss incidents described as minor – men, no harm done, why didn’t they just say no? – cannot describe the speaker as weak because there is a second, third, and fourth person with the same emotional response. (Spacey hit back at the program, criticizing the lack of detail in the allegations made against him and the time he was given to respond. He has also described some of his interactions with other men as “awkward,” but maintains that his behavior “was not illegal, nor was it ever alleged to be illegal.)
The alleged victims of Spacey Unmasked are all male, but not all interviewees are male. Two women who worked on House of Cards recall seeing what a California judge later agreed was inappropriate behavior tantamount to workplace harassment: the bitter experience of years of daring to exist as women, suggests they can tell from across the room when a conversation has been the wrong vibration, or when a hand has rested on the wrong part of someone else’s body. Anyone who watches Spacey Unmasked will gain some of that wisdom.
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