Is Kevin Spacey Acting Again?

The actor and his supporters claim a powerful Channel 4 documentary proves he is a victim of cancel culture. If that's the case it raises serious questions about what people mean by....cancel culture.

The actor Kevin Spacey has a new role. It’s as a victim of that alleged bane of contemporary life, cancel culture. The question is whether his performance in the role is quite as award-winning as his supporters claim.

They cite the new Channel 4 documentary ‘Spacey Unmasked’ as just the latest example of a vicious campaign to ruin Spacey and keep him from rebuilding his career after numerous allegations of sexual offences. Allegations, they rightly point out, of which the Hollywood giant has been found innocent by juries on both sides of the Atlantic.

The argument is a reminder there’s always been disagreement about exactly what people mean by cancel culture. Some on the left dispute it exists at all, preferring to view the way, say, the historian David Starkey was relentlessly attacked for a couple of comments on race as evidence that social media now allows Establishment figures to be held to account. Instead they argue, less than convincingly, we now have an accountability culture.

Whether you agree, probably depends on whether you think Starkey’s throwaway remark that “Slavery was not genocide otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived." was unforgiveable. Or unfortunate.

Starkey also sparked outrage when he claimed protests following the death of George Floyd were characterised by "violence" and "victimhood"; comments which seem positively mild given what we now know about Floyd and the kangaroo court which tried the cops who attempted to arrest him. Never mind the financial scandals that have swirled around the organisation that coordinated those protests, Black Lives Matters.

Whatever we call it there’s no denying the existence of a cultural phenomenon that quickly turns an ill-judged remark or an unevidenced allegation into a spiral of loathing marked by all the mild reasonableness of sans-culottes sizing up the neck of a French aristocrat. Perhaps witch-hunters argued dunking women in ponds was about accountability too?

They certainly did when the philosopher Kathleen Stock questioned the mantra transwomen are women. Luckily, Professor Stock was spared a dunking but the hounding led her to leave a job she’d once loved. Dr David Bell was traduced for merely warning about the treatment of children at the Tavistock. JK Rowling has been too powerful to cancel, though that didn’t stop an army of online trolls exhausting themselves in the attempt.

Are the experiences of these gender critical individuals really akin to that of Kevin Spacey? Apparently so, or according to the actor and his supporters, who argue he is the victim of a determined and wholly unfair attempt to destroy his career, one from which he has been unable to recover.

Spacey has certainly suffered. He was fired overnight from his hugely successful Netflix series ‘House of Cards’ after claims of sexual harrassment. His supporters are furious that even though a US jury later decided the accusations were untrue and the actor was found innocent on other charges in a UK court last year, the media and Hollywood refuse to return to the status quo ante bellum. The defining characteristic of cancel culture, for those who believe it exists, is that the victim is never forgiven and alleged crimes, even disproved ones, are never forgotten. Once cancelled, always cancelled.

Spacey is particularly exercised by the new Channel 4 documentary because it appears perfectly timed to put the kybosh on tentative attempts to rebuild his career. He points out the documentary was originally commissioned in 2022 before the two trials, clearly, he says, in expectation of a guilty verdict. The producers, he suggests, were so determined to “get” him they have now simply recut their film and shifted its focus from the original disproved criminal allegations to other less serious ones. This proves, his supporters say, a deep animus against Spacey.

It’s true that some of the allegations in the C4 film are from decades ago; one from 50 years ago no less. Nor is any documentary proof provided that Spacey ever offered any of his accusers career progress if they had sex with him.

For all these reasons I was inclined to accept claims by Spacey’s friends and supporters that the Channel 4 doc was an exercise in muck-raking. Then I made the mistake of watching Spacey’s interview with ex GB News presenter Dan Wootton, which went out before the documentary as a spoiler. I’m not sure it spoiled the C4 film as much as Spacey’s case.

This is the story of how my initial sympathy for Spacey didn’t survive contact with the documentary he dismissed and its powerful testimonies from his accusers.