Kevin Spacey
speaker
258 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard Jun 2024
Kevin Spacey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Why don't you try that with a bit of blah, blah, blah?
I also think that one should just acknowledge that where he was from, there is something that happens when you do an accent. And in fact, sometimes when I would say to Bo or one of the other writers, this is really good and I love the idea, but it rhythmically doesn't help. I need at least two more words to rhythmically make this work in his accent because it just doesn't scan well.
And that's not iambic pentameter. I'm not talking about that. There is that as well in Shakespeare, but there was some times when it's too many lines, it's not enough lines in order for me to make this work for the way he speaks, the way he sounds, and what that accent does to emphasis.
Not really at all. I mean, Clinton, you know, look, Bill Clinton, he had a way of talking, you know, that he was very slow and he felt your pain, you know. But Frank Underwood was deeper, more direct, and less poetic in the way that Clinton would talk. I'll tell you this Clinton story that you'll like. So we decide to do a performance of The Iceman Cometh for the Democratic Party on Broadway.
And the president is going to come. He's going to see this four and a half hour play. And then we're going to do this event afterward. And a couple of weeks before we're going to do this event, someone at the White House calls and says, listen, it's very unusual to get the president for like six and a half hours. So we're suggesting that the president come and see the first act. And then he goes.
And I knew what was happening. Now, first of all, Clinton knows this play. He knows what this play is about. And I, you know, as gently as I could said, well, if the president is thinking of leaving at intermission, then I'm afraid we're going to have to cancel the event. There's just no way that... So anyway, oh no, it's fine, it's fine. Now I know what was happening.
What was happening was that someone had read the play and they were quite concerned. And I'll tell you why. Because the play is about this character that I portrayed named Hickey. And in the course of the play, as things get more and more revealed, you realize that this man that I'm playing has been a philanderer. He's cheated on his wife quite a lot.
And by the end of the play, he is arrested and taken off because he ended up ending his wife's life because she forgave him too much and he couldn't live with it. So now imagine this. There's 2,000 people at the Brooks-Atkinson Theater watching President Clinton watching this play. And at the end of the night, we take our curtain call. They bring out the presidential podium.
Bill Clinton stands up there and he says, well, I suppose we should all thank Kevin and this extraordinary company of actors for giving us all way too much to think about.
And the audience fell over in laughter, and then he gave a great speech. And I thought, that was a pretty good way to handle that.
When I was starting to do research, I wanted to meet with the whip, Kevin McCarthy. And he wouldn't meet with me until I called his office back and said, tell him I'm playing a Democrat, not a Republican. And then he met with me. Nice. And he was helpful. He took me to whip meetings.
a huge amount of the credit. And not just for what he established, but the fact that every director after stayed within that world. I think that's why the series had a very consistent feeling to it. It was like watching a very long movie. the style, where the camera went, what it did, what it didn't do, how we used this, how we used that, how we didn't do this.
There were things that he laid the foundation for that we managed to maintain Pretty much until Bo Williman left the show, they got rid of Fincher, and I was sort of the last man standing in terms of fighting again. Netflix had never had any creative control at all. We had complete creative control. But over time, they started to...
get themselves involved because, look, this is what happens to networks. They'd never made a television show before, ever, and then four years later, they were the best. And so then you're going to get suggestions about casting and about writing and about music and scenes.
And so there was a considerable amount of pushback that I had to do when they started to get involved in ways that I thought was affecting the quality of the show.
It can happen in different ways. I mean, I remember one argument we had was we had specifically shot a scene so that there would be no score in that scene, so that there was no music. It was just two people talking. And then we end up seeing a cut where they've decided to put music in. And it is against everything that scene's supposed to be about.
And you have to go and say, guys, this was intentional. We did not want score. And now you've added score because what, you think it's too quiet? You think our audience can't listen to two people talk for two and a half minutes? This show has proved anything. It's proved that people have patience and they're willing to watch an entire season over a weekend.
So there are those kind of arguments that can happen. You know, there's different arguments on different levels and they sometimes have to do with, I mean, look, go back to The Godfather. They wanted to fire Pacino because they didn't see anything happening. They saw nothing happening. So they wanted to fire Pacino.
And then finally Coppola thought, I'll shoot the scene where he kills the police commissioner and they'll do that scene now. And that was the first scene where they went, yeah, actually there's something going on there. So Pacino kept the role.
Look, I think that we can't forget that Pacino is also an animal of the theater. You know, he does a lot of plays and he started off doing plays and, you know, movies were, you know, Panic in Needle Park was his first. And yeah, I think there's that period of time when he was doing some incredible parts, incredible movies.
Showing 181–200 of 258 · page 10 of 13
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