Spacey's double life

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Spacey returns as Lex Luthor

Six weeks into his run as the suave, fast-talking socialite CK Dexter, Kevin Spacey left his role in The Philadelphia Story to his understudy. He was only away for six weeks, but the artistic director of the Old Vic still came in for a lot of flak.

At the time, he patiently explained that he had a date with a movie camera - he had to fly to Australia for his role as archvillain Lex Luthor in Superman Returns.

One of the summer's most eagerly awaited blockbusters, it's also the most expensive film in Hollywood history, with a budget of a quarter of a billion dollars and a multi-million-dollar pay cheque for Spacey.

Surrounded by lavish sets and special effects, Spacey's shaven-headed supervillain has a more subdued malevolence than Gene Hackman gave the role in earlier films. His dastardly plan this time is to use Superman's own technology from Krypton to create a new land mass in the Atlantic Ocean which could wipe out the United States. He is more ruthless tycoon than comic-book bad guy.

"There's a lot of [former Enron chairman] Ken Lay in him this time," smirks Spacey. "He is more smartly dressed than I think we have seen him looking before. I like to call the look General Rommel goes to dinner."

With hands crossed calmly before him on the table, the 46-year-old movie star turned artistic director talks in a composed monotone about his new film. It's only when I ask him how he combines a Hollywood career with the job of running a theatre on the other side of the Atlantic that his voice rises in defence.

"Six weeks doing Superman last year," he says, testily, "41 weeks performing in three different plays on the Old Vic stage - that's a pretty good balance.

"No matter where I am, I am always running the Old Vic theatre. Thank God for Blackberrys and email. I was up this morning at six o'clock doing work on behalf of the Old Vic, and I continue to do that no matter where I am in the world."

American film critic Dwight Garner has said of Spacey that he is a master of "woozy insincerity" and, although he was talking about his onscreen presence, it could just as easily be applied to his off-screen persona. Or maybe his deadpan, cynical demeanour is his way of dealing with the critics.

"It's the opinion of 11 or 12 people," he rails on about the Old Vic. "But I am not doing what I'm doing to satisfy that group. I am doing what I am doing to bring an audience into the theatre and build a company that's going to last long after I'm gone. That takes a long time. In my estimation 18 months is not long enough to judge the success or failure of a theatre company. Give us five or six seasons, then we'll look back and see what we've got."

History, he asserts, will prove him right. Look, he continues, at another Yank in London, the late Sam Wanamaker and his dream to rebuild the Globe on the South Bank in the Seventies. "The amount of negative, dismissive commentary that was written about that dream was, as far as I am concerned, embarrassing," says Spacey, with some emotion. "But Sam kept his head high and kept his vision despite the insulting commentary.

"The debate has been over the choice of work that we presented. I chose consciously, deliberately, not to do classic work. I chose work which I thought would appeal to a broader, younger and more diverse audience. All this stuff" - he swats away the criticism melodramatically with his hand - "will fade. Just like it did with Sam Wanamaker. Maybe in five years' time they will realise that I am still coming to work every day."

It's fighting talk from a man who has always struggled to accept entrenched institutions, not just the British theatre critic. Born in New Jersey, he was expelled from the very strict Northridge Military Academy as a boy and later dropped out of the prestigious Juilliard School of Drama because of conflicts with his teachers.

Even in his recent film career he has bucked tradition by pursuing projects out of the mainstream, such as his last major film, the labour-of-love Bobby Darin biopic, Beyond the Sea (2004), which he directed, starred and sang in.

"A lot of people let success go to their head and do movie after movie where they play the same thing and get paid a lot of money and don't contribute anything," he says.

"As far as I'm concerned, when I looked at what happened in my career in 2000 -after American Beauty - I thought it couldn't get much better. What was I going to spend the rest of my life doing? Trying to top myself ? Trying to stay hot, trying to make sure I was in the right movies? I don't give a shit."

That, says Spacey, is why he pursued the Old Vic job. "I'm trying to do something with my success which is bigger than myself. I'm no longer interested in my personal career. I am interested in the impact I can have on a lot of other people's careers and on audiences."

Superman Returns will be his first popcorn movie. It is the fifth in the franchise, and the first since Christopher Reeve's final appearance as Clark Kent in 1987. Inheriting the cape and codpiece is strapping newcomer Brandon Routh, whose soft and sensitive Superman has already become the centre of a media storm. "How gay is Superman?" asked leading US gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate in a widely quoted cover story.

Annoying speculation over sexuality is something that Spacey has personally suffered - especially at the hands of the UK press in April 2004, when he was mugged while walking his dog at 4am in a south London park. He has repeatedly denied being gay or bisexual.

Superman Returns director Bryan Singer, who is gay, and who gave Spacey his big film break in The Usual Suspects in 1995, argues that this film is his "most heterosexual" to date, but, a fortnight before it opens in the US, industry fears are growing that teenage boys for whom the epic is tailored might find it too soppy.

"Bryan was attempting to make a deeper, perhaps more emotionally involving film than we have seen before," says Spacey.

Indeed, Singer puts more dramatic weight into the love triangle in the film between Superman, Lois Lane (played by Kat e Bosworth) and her boyfriend Richard White (handsome James Marsden) than into Luthor's plans for world domination.

Spacey says he admires Singer because he knows what he wants from his actors. "I have always maintained that I am a better actor when I have a good director than when I'm left to my own devices and have to save myself, because it's a lousy, feeble person who can't say what they want and don't know what they want," he spits.

The next director he is set to work with is David Dobkin, who follows up Wedding Crashers with another Hollywood comedy, Joe Claus, in which Spacey plays Santa's slacker brother, with cast mates Vince Vaughn and pal Judi Dench. Filming in London this autumn, it will be convenient for Spacey, who is due at the Old Vic in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten from September.

He's ready for the critics. "They can take my name and stick it in a headline and create a story. I know the game. On the plus side, people are talking about the Old Vic again, and, let's face it, people don't read articles. They read the first paragraph and then turn the page."

On that catty note, Spacey ramps up the rhetoric. "I am having the time of my life, I really am. If some people believe in what we're doing and think I'm the right person for it, great. If some people don't, fine. We're still going to be around, They are going to have to deal with us. We are not going anywhere."

All the same, expect Spacey to be out of the country periodically on movie business. "I will, without question, play Lex if there are more sequels and Bryan is along for the ride," he says.

But, lucrative acting jobs aside, Spacey's life in the capital is his primary focus. "I feel very comfortable in London now. In fact, in the past eight months I now feel that I live here. I am not visiting any more. It's my home."

• Superman Returns opens on 14 July.

 

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