Nine years after his career was upended by allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct, Kevin Spacey told “Real Time” host Bill Maher that he feels his career is on an upward swing and that he feels “less in jail” now than he has in past years.
“I feel less in jail than I did,” Spacey told Maher on Monday’s episode of the latter’s “Club Random” podcast. “When people actually start to hear the facts, understand what we won in courts, I think people now look at this and think, ‘Maybe nine years has been enough.’”
“I feel much more welcomed, and I think that things are moving in the direction that we hoped they were moving in,” the actor, who won two Oscars for his performances in “American Beauty” and “The Usual Suspects,” explained.
“If I had been a sports figure, I would have been benched for seven games,” he later added. “If you’re hitting home runs, they want you on the field.”
Spacey’s career took a sudden downturn in 2017 after actor Anthony Rapp accused him of assaulting him when he was still a teenager. Rapp’s allegations prompted multiple others to come forward with similar accusations against Spacey. Rapp went on to file a $40 million sexual assault and battery lawsuit against Spacey, but the latter was ultimately found not liable on all counts by a New York jury.
“There are certain cases where part of something is true, but it’s been rethought, it’s been redesigned or it’s been entirely made up, certainly in the case of Anthony Rapp, which is a case that we won in federal court in New York,” Spacey told Maher, further noting that him and his team have won “in every court we’ve gone into with a jury.”
Maher did partly push back against Spacey. While the comedian and “Real Time” host said he was not completely well-versed in the details of the allegations against Spacey, he told the actor that he thought the sheer number of accusations and alleged victims led him to believe there was “too much smoke to be no fire.”
“I never said there was no fire,” Spacey responded. “It just wasn’t a raging forest fire. It was a small kitchen fire that could have been put out with an extinguisher.”
He added, “I hit on a lot of guys.”
In the same statement in which he denied Rapp’s allegations, Spacey shocked many when he formally came out as gay in 2017. His coupling of his coming out with his denial of Rapp’s accusations prompted criticism from many.
“I was fiercely closeted,” Spacey told Maher, reflecting on that moment. “I thought I was so clever that nobody knew, but, of course, kind of everybody knew.”
Not long after the allegations against him piled up and came to light, Spacey was replaced as J. Paul Getty by the late Christopher Plummer in director Ridley Scott’s 2017 thriller “All the Money in the World.” He was additionally fired from “House of Cards,” the Netflix thriller that he led for the first five of its six seasons.
Seven years later, in 2024, Spacey revealed that he owed “many millions” in legal fees and said that the Baltimore home he had been living in for years prior was being foreclosed on and put up for auction. He added at the time, “I’m not sure where I am going to live now.”
Spacey has only appeared in a handful of low-budget and European productions since his public cancellation in 2017.
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