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
I read in the New York Times that he was coming to Broadway to do this production of A Long Day's Journey tonight, a year and some months after I read this article. And I was like, I'm going to play Jamie in that production.
And I then, with a lot of opposition, because the cast and director didn't want to see me, they said that the director, Jonathan Miller, wanted movie actors to play the two sons. And ultimately, I found out that Jonathan Miller, the director, was coming to New York to do a series of lectures at Alice Tully Hall. And I went to try to figure out how I could maybe meet him.
And I was sitting in that theater listening to this incredible lecture he was doing. And sitting next to me was an elderly woman. I mean, elderly, 80-something. She was asleep. But sticking out of her handbag, which was on the floor, was an invitation to a cocktail reception in honor of Dr. Jonathan Miller. And so I thought, you know, she's tired. She's probably going to go home.
So I took that and walked into this cocktail reception. went over to Dr. Miller, who was incredibly kind, and said, sit down, I'm always very curious, what brings young people to my lectures? And I said to him, Eugene O'Neill brought me here. And he was like, what? I've always wanted to meet him, where is he?
And I told him that I'd been trying for seven months to get an audition for A Long Day's Journey, and that his American cast directors were telling my agents that he wanted big American movie stars. And at that moment, he turned and he saw one of those casting directors who was there that night. Because I knew he was going to be in New York starting auditions that week.
And she was staring daggers at me. And he just got it. And he said, someone have a pen. And he took a little paper and started writing. He said, listen, Kevin, there are many situations in which casting directors have a lot of say and a lot of power and a lot of leverage. And then there are other situations where they just take directors' messages. And on this one, they're taking my messages.
This is where I'm staying. Make sure you people get to me. We start auditions on Thursday. And on Thursday, I had an opportunity to come in and audition for this play that I'd been working on and preparing for.
And at the end of it, I did four scenes at the end of it, he said to me that unless someone else came in and blew him against the wall like I had just done, as far as he was concerned, I pretty much had the part, but I couldn't tell my agents that yet because I had to come back and read with Mr. Lemon.
And so three months later, in August of 1985, I found myself in a room with Jack Lemon again at 890 Broadway, which is where they rehearse a lot of the Broadway plays. And we did four scenes together and I was toppling over him. I was pushing him. I was relentless. And I'll never forget at the end of that, Lemon came over to me.
He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, that was a touch of terrific. I never thought we'd find the rotten kid, but he's it. Jesus Christ, what the hell was that? And I ended up spending the next year of my life with that man.
I've always, we used to joke that if every contract came with a Jack Lemmon clause, it would be a more beautiful world.
Wow. I think he truly set out in his life to accomplish what his father said to him on his deathbed. His father was, by the way, called the Donut King in Boston. And not in the entertainment business at all. He literally owned a donut company. And when he was passing away, Jack said, the last thing my father said to me was, go out there and spread a little sunshine.
And I truly think that's what Jack loved to do. I remember this, and I don't know if this will answer your question, but I think it's revealing about what he's able to do and what he was able to do and how that ultimately influenced what I was able to do. Sam Mendes had never directed a film before American Beauty.
And so what he did was he took the best elements of theater and applied them to the process. So we rehearsed it like a play in a soundstage where everything was laid out like it would be in a play and this couch will be here. And yeah. He'd sent me a couple of tapes.
He'd sent me two cassette tapes, one that he'd like to call pre-Lester, before he begins to move in any direction, and then post-Lester. And they just were different songs. And then he said to me one day, and I always thought this was brilliant of Sam to use Lemon, knowing what Lemon meant to me. He said, when was the last time you watched The Apartment? I said, I don't know.
I mean, I love that movie so much. He goes, I want you to watch it again and then let's talk. So I went and I watched the movie again. And we sat down and Sam said, what Lemon does in that film is incredible because there is never a moment in the movie where we see him change.
And he becomes the man he becomes because of the experiences that he has through the course of the film. But there's this remarkable consistency in who he becomes. And that's what I need you to do as Lester. I don't want the audience to ever see him change. I want him to evolve. And so we did some, I mean, first of all, it was just a great direction.
And then second of all, we did some things that people don't know we did to aid that gradual shift of that man's character. First of all, I had to be in the best shape from the beginning of the movie because we didn't shoot it in sequence. So I was in this crazy shape. I had this wonderful trainer named Mike Torsha, who just was incredible.
But so what we did was, in order to then show this gradual shift, was I had three different hair pieces, I had three different kinds of costumes of different colors and sizes, and I had different makeup.
so in the beginning i was wearing a kind of drab dull slightly you know uninspired hair piece and my makeup was kind of gray and boring and i was a little bit there were times when i was like too much like this and sam would go kevin you look like walter math out would you please stand up a little bit we're sort of midway through at this point and
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