Kevin Spacey Fowler is an American actor. Known for his work on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Tony Award, and two Laurence Olivier Awards. Spacey was named an honorary Commander and Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2010 and 2015, respectively. Spacey had small roles in Mike Nichols’ comedy-drama films Heartburn (1986) and Working Girl (1988).
He won two Academy Awards: Best Supporting Actor for playing a con man in The Usual Suspects (1995) and Best Actor for playing a man in a mid-life crisis in American Beauty (1999). His other notable films include Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), Se7en (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), Pay It Forward (2000), Superman Returns (2006), Margin Call (2011), Horrible Bosses (2011), and Baby Driver (2017). He has also directed the films Albino Alligator (1996) and Beyond the Sea (2004).
In Broadway theatre, Spacey starred in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1986. He won a Tony Award in 1991 for his role in Lost in Yonkers. He won a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in a revival of The Iceman Cometh in 1999. Spacey portrayed the title role in Richard III in 2011 and Clarence Darrow in a West End production of Darrow in 2015. He was the artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London from 2004 until stepping down in mid-2015, for which he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
In 2017, he hosted the 71st Tony Awards. In television, Spacey portrayed Ron Klain in Recount (2008) and produced Bernard and Doris (2008), both for HBO Films. From 2013 to 2017, he starred as Frank Underwood in the Netflix political drama series House of Cards, which won him a Golden Globe Award and two consecutive Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Actor. Spacey, who has always denied the accusations, was cleared of several sexual assault accusations in 2022 in New York and in 2023 in London.
Some of the best quotes from Kevin Spacey are listed below.
- “A man can convince anyone has someone else but never himself.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Am I now supposed to go on Oprah and cry and tell you my deepest, darkest secrets because you want to know?” – Kevin Spacey
- “And I certainly won’t lay out areas of my life that I think are just private.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Anyone with an internet connection and an idea can develop an audience.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Anytime someone can beat the acting out of someone else, I think it’s a wonderful thing.” – Kevin Spacey
- “As a producer or financier, you are going to go where you get the best bang for your buck.” – Kevin Spacey
- “As an actor, you’re always nervous as to what a director will do with something.” – Kevin Spacey
- “At the end of the day, storytelling is actually very simple in its origin as long as there are people who want to tell stories and there are people who want to hear them.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Audiences grew to like this duality of feeling, where you’re both championing a character and you’re revolted by them.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Because my mother was in love with Bobby Darin, I grew up with his records playing in our house all the time.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you’d rather not know the answers to.” – Kevin Spacey
- “But I feel that I have a responsibility to help the film and I have relations with the studio and with those who put up the money so that I can tell a story that I believe in.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Cable TV has become where the best actors, writers and directors have gone to work because they are allowed to do character-driven stories.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favorite actors have played Darrow Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Clearly the success of the Netflix model, releasing the entire season of ‘House of Cards’ at once, proved one thing: The audience wants the control. They want the freedom. If they want to binge as they’ve been doing on ‘House of Cards’ and lots of other shows, we should let them binge.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Directing a film was something I was yearning to do. I always wanted to see if I had the capacity to be a good storyteller.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Essentially, your voice is an instrument; it’s a muscle, and you have to treat it like a muscle, and so you have to work it.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Exposure to the arts and culture is enormously valuable.” – Kevin Spacey
- “For kids growing up now, there’s no difference watching ‘Avatar’ on an iPad or watching YouTube on TV or watching ‘Game of Thrones’ on their computer. It’s all content. It’s just story.” – Kevin Spacey
- “For me, coming to work every day has turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be.” – Kevin Spacey
- “For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Fortunately for me, I don’t come from the school where you only measure success by how much money something makes or whether it has a big box-office weekend. I measure it by how much people actually participate in the process.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Fundamentally, I like to accomplish things.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Games are advancing in terms of storytelling and trying to create a character, and it’s a brand-new audience for me.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Gaming is going into storytelling. It was a new audience.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Have we become so celebrity-obsessed that there is no longer a difference between a character and an actor? I hope not.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I actually have a number of lovely watches from the International Watch Company.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I always remember is that no matter how good I might be in a movie, I’ll never be any better. It’s frozen. But in theatre I can be better tomorrow night, I can be better the night after that and I can be better in a week. The journey you go through as an actor is incredible.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I always thought that, in a way, you want your Superman to be a total unknown.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I am not an image. I am a human being.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I can imagine there is going to come a time when someone will do 13 hours of a story without breaks.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I can’t imagine that anyone in Hollywood is sitting around trying to decide what actor is good or right or qualified for a role and is being denied a role because of their political views. I don’t think that’s the way Hollywood works. We’re not living in an era of blacklisting.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I certainly identify with the role of mentor and, to some degree, maybe teacher. I do a lot of work with kids at the Old Vic.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I couldn’t imagine something asking as much of me as House Of Cards. It’s a great warm-up for coming back to the screen.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I don’t know who Keyser Soze is, but whoever he is, he is going to get gloriously drunk tonight.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I don’t want to show deleted scenes. I don’t like an audience looking at what the movie might have been – if it’s in the movie, it’s in the movie.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I find it sad that by not talking about who I sleep with, that makes me mysterious. There was a time when I would have been called a gentleman.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I guess I’ve been training in the theater for as long as I can remember.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I have always believed that the risk takers are eventually rewarded.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I have done films where we all thought the director didn’t know what he was doing and it is going to be a gobble turkey. And you go and watch it and it is great.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I have long been a supporter of The Princes Trust, and so when American Express asked me to launch Amex Be Inspired and help young people build their confidence and fulfil their potential, I was delighted to get involved.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I have never played a game in my life.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I just want to be better. I just want to be better. But this is very encouraging.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I like being able to go to a local pub and have great food and particularly love pubs that welcome my dogs.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I liked it because it was such a dangerous script and showed just what human beings are capable of. Here was a movie in which Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, who always win in every movie they ever do, simply don’t win. I felt that was outrageous for a commercial movie.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I love producing, I love bringing things together.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I mean we all played as kids. You play games, you take on different characters, you imitate; the fun and the love of play has never left me.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I never doubted at all. If you ever doubt then you are in trouble. I never thought: ‘I should do this or that in case I don’t make it.’ I never had a back-up plan.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I open myself up every time I walk on screen and give you everything that I am. There are parts of me that are in every movie that I’ve done. That to me is what my job is.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I remember meeting the likes of Johnny Carson and Jimmy Stewart for the first time and being completely starstruck.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I suppose the most important thing is to stay interested. It’s very easy in life if you get to a place where you’re successful to hit the same groove on the record player over and over again because it’s safe.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I terribly miss – we all miss, I think – somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I think people love it when anybody acts bad; it’s not particular to me.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I think that acting is a very humanizing profession.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I think that there is no doubt that every experience you have in your life, whether it’s playing a character or something else, you bring that to the work.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I think you need the failures to get the success. You learn more from that.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I want to bring theatre to a new generation, using the tools available to us, including taking it out to them on film and with new technology, but that is just so they can discover theatre. I want them to come in and sit in a theatre. This is the way to plant seeds.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I was not a studious kid, and I struggled to find things that would command my attention and engage my ideas and energies.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I was terrible in my first play. After that experience, I had to face that I wasn’t good enough to play with the big boys. I had to go away and learn, so I worked in regional theater for three years. I even understudied at the Kennedy Center.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. I’ve got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m a relatively ugly character who’s done pretty damn well in film.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m able to hang up the character with the costume at the end of the movie.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m always taken aback by things that are successful that I think are just crap, and then I’m completely surprised when things I do end up being successful because you walk into things and you never know it’s just really remarkable.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m attracted to things that are challenging and fun and interesting, and it certainly seems that audiences enjoy them as well.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m aware that, from the outside, this looks like I’ve got quite an ego.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m lucky if I find one movie a year that’s worth doing, and when I do find one, it usually only takes 20-30 days to shoot.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m not out there trying to get press for myself nor am I trying to convince anybody that I’m living any kind of a life. I’m actually trying to convince people: I don’t want you to know what I’m living, because it’s none of your business.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m not revolted by Washington.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m not someone who’s led my life trying to get publicity; I’d rather do my work and go home.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’m supposed to convince you, for two hours, that I’m somebody else. Now if you know everything about my life, if you think you’ve got me figured out and you think you know all my dark secrets, how am I ever going to convince you that I’m somebody else?” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’ve been around politics a long time. I’ve seen it at its best and its worst, been at so many events, listened to private conversations versus public speaking, understood the game of it, and in many ways the theatrics.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’ve been intrigued by politics my whole life. And, yes, I am very close to the Clintons. I was a Hillary person until I was an Obama person. And she was a Hillary person, too, until she was an Obama one, evidently.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’ve been on sets where things weren’t relaxed because someone was creating tension for no reason.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’ve done big studio films and the big studio films I’ve done, I’ve tried to do the interesting ones and the ones where I could live with myself in the morning.” – Kevin Spacey
- “I’ve never heard of a situation where, because somebody had a particular political belief, they didn’t get a part. I think it’s a bit of a myth.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If I’m sick of me, I can only imagine how other people feel.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If it were not for people who stepped forward and gave me opportunities at a time when I had not proved myself at all, believe me, I would not have a career.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn’t that show an incredible attention span?” – Kevin Spacey
- “If there is one thing I object to, its actors talking about how tough their jobs are.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you haven’t turned rebel by twenty you’ve got no heart; if you haven’t turned establishment by thirty you’ve got no brains!” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you ignore the murdering and the conniving, Francis Underwood is an effective politician.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you wanna compete, you’ve got to get into the original content game.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you’re lucky enough to have done well, then it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down.” – Kevin Spacey
- “If you’re not concerned about maintaining an image, you can pursue roads that another actor might not take.” – Kevin Spacey
- “In film, movies schedules are based on three things: actors availabilities, when are sets being built, when you can rent the place you’re going to film in.” – Kevin Spacey
- “In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of creative programming, and I think it represents a third golden age of television because the creators have more control over the story. The audience doesn’t care about the platform. They care about the content.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It is not about whether you are an executive, a studio or a network. If you have a story or an idea you can build a following for it.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s a great thriller or mystery, but on another level it’s a film about the fact that, if you only look at a person through one lens, or only believe what you’re told, you can often miss the truth that is staring you in the face.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s a really wonderful thing to focus your life on something other than your own personal career and ambition.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s extremely dangerous to compare anyone else to Shakespeare.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s interesting to play a politician who gets stuff done.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s much more interesting when you go to different places – make a left turn when nobody expects you to make a left turn, and make a right when nobody expects you to do that.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s not even about being negative. It’s just being unsettled, unsatisfied, unfinished.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s so easy for us to misperceive and see the things in others that we want to see. And, when we’re wrong, and often we’re dead wrong, we miss the truth.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s the details and the human element that makes Recount entertaining. Even though we know how the election ends, it plays like a thriller. It’s also funny.” – Kevin Spacey
- “It’s the kind of democratization of the Internet that has led to the breaking down of barriers into the creative arts.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Kids aren’t growing up with a sense of television as the aspirational place for their ideas.” – Kevin Spacey
- “London is a very energizing place to be.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Look, at the end of the day people have to respect people’s differences. I am different than some people would like me to be.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Mediocrity is the elephant in the room.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Meeting the person you are going to be playing is very unique.” – Kevin Spacey
- “My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.” – Kevin Spacey
- “My job is to interpret. I’m an interpreter. I can add things and bring unique qualities to the role that the writer may not have thought of, but someone else created the fundamental idea.” – Kevin Spacey
- “My mother was sarcastic and delightful and, trust me, quite remarkable.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Netflix did it right and focused on all the things that have replaced the dumb, raw numbers of the Nielsen world – they embraced targeted marketing and ‘brand’ as a virtue higher than ratings.” – Kevin Spacey
- “No one should ever feel sorry for me. I’ve been treated very well for the most part.” – Kevin Spacey
- “No one’s personal life is in the public interest. It’s gossip, bottom line. End of story.” – Kevin Spacey
- “One can never take the cynicism one comes across in life too seriously.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Our job, you know, in the entertainment profession is to try to illuminate and show people all sides of humanity, and it doesn’t just mean that you can only do movies that are only about the good parts of us. You have to be able to eliminate the bad parts.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Over the years, I’ve been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I’ve tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.” – Kevin Spacey
- “People have different reasons for the way they live their lives. You cannot put everyone’s reasons in the same box.” – Kevin Spacey
- “People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Politics and acting are very closely tied. The job is to convince.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Pushing the boundaries of what is expected of you is important to me.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Secondarily, I think films that are driven by music also terrify studios.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Secret Cinema has created a new way of experiencing film. The fusion of film and theatre allows for a much more powerful experience and adds an incredibly unique dimension for the audience. It certainly did for me. I was blown away.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Sometimes I’ll be flipping through the channels and I’ll see a movie I’m in. And I’ll probably stop and think, ‘Sure, I’ll watch this.’” – Kevin Spacey
- “Sometimes it’s the crazy people who turn out to be not so crazy.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Stay true to your brand and true to your voice and audiences will respond to that authenticity with enthusiasm and passion.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Success is like death. The more successful you become, the higher the houses in the hills get and the higher the fences get.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Talent is one thing, it is how you nurture and develop it, and never walk away from it. You can be rich, successful, you win awards, but it can always be better.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Talent is only interesting if it’s challenged.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The 24-Hour Plays is a quite brilliant, exhilarating event for everyone concerned.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The audience, the place you’re in, has everything to do with how your performance goes.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The control is shifting because of the democratization of the internet. My industry is very good at building walls to stop people getting in.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The greatest sound in the theater is silence.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making us believe that he’s not real.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The less you know about me the easier it is to convince you that I’m the character on screen.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The most important definition of an actor, the job of the actor, is to serve the writer, not yourself. Way too many actors serve themselves.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The movies are not my first priority – the theater is.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actor’s theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The only thing worse than a loser is someone who won’t admit he played badly.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The process of doing a play is an organic one, and the process of doing a film is totally inorganic.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The story is everything, which means it’s our job to tell better stories.” – Kevin Spacey
- “The work of John Lennon was marked by its exquisite beauty and by its brutal honesty.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Theatre is alive and it is now, and then it’s gone.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There are times when you do a play when you are living in the character over a two-and-a-half-hour period or longer, and you come to the end of the night, and you can feel like you were hit by a truck.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There are two things that have been happening over the last few decades in my opinion. First, there have been unbelievable, remarkable, pioneering advances in technology and, second, an equal amount of evolution in creativity. These two shifts are meeting at an intersection.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There are ways in which you can make sure that even if people come to the theatre because they know an actor or actress, by the end, they’ve forgotten that, and they leave going, Wow – what an amazing play.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There’s no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. Its all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.” – Kevin Spacey
- “There’s nothing like standing in a place and wanting nothing so much as to change but simply not being able to.” – Kevin Spacey
- “To look in the eyes of audiences and see the kind of naughty glee that they got with being on the inside, the audience becomes your co-conspirators.” – Kevin Spacey
- “To me, getting up every single night and trying to reach out to an audience, and trying to dig deeper and further in the play to serve the writer and to understand yourself in that context is how you continue to grow and learn.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.” – Kevin Spacey
- “We’re all victims of our own hubris at times.” – Kevin Spacey
- “We’ve learned the lesson that the music industry didn’t learn: give people what they want, when they want it, in the form they want it in, at a reasonable price, and they’ll more likely pay for it rather than steal it.” – Kevin Spacey
- “What a martyr craves more than anything is a sword to fall on, so you sharpen the blade and hold it at just the right angle.” – Kevin Spacey
- “What I do is interpret, not create. I may add elements and do something different. That is what is so incredible about theatre. Why do we love it that there are nine Hamletsor six King Lears over two years? We love to watch a different actor attack the same material.” – Kevin Spacey
- “What I like about Britain is that I can live a normal life here.” – Kevin Spacey
- “What’s my favorite book? It changes all the time.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again and again, forever. So, my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.” – Kevin Spacey
- “When I look around at Broadway and the West End, theatre is becoming an exclusive club.” – Kevin Spacey
- “When I was young, I learned very early on that I could make my mother laugh. And that was one of the greatest sounds I ever heard.” – Kevin Spacey
- “When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera.” – Kevin Spacey
- “When you know you have 1,000 people sitting on the edge of their seats in silence because of a shift that just happened on stage, there is no better feeling.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Whether its Veep or Homeland or The West Wing – which is a more idealized version of democracy – people are fascinated by politics.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Whether thats positive or not, people are talking about the Old Vic Theater again with passion and commitment and controversy and debate.” – Kevin Spacey
- “While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.” – Kevin Spacey
- “While the sciences are hugely important, let us not leave behind a child’s imagination.” – Kevin Spacey
- “Why not sit around a Beverly Hills pool collecting residual cheques? That is not the kind of life I want.” – Kevin Spacey
- “With every job, you should have something to lose, something to gain, something to learn.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You are not just, “This is the way I play it every night.” You are constantly finding new ways in, new attacks, “I want to try it this way. Maybe this scene is affecting that scene. I want to attack this scene differently.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You can’t turn a “no” to a “yes” without a “maybe” in between.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You can’t win a marathon without putting some bandaids on your nipples!” – Kevin Spacey
- “You have to always be ready, always be alive, and always be willing to move in a new direction.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You learn every single day when you’re running a company. You learn as you go.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You must find a way to express your ideas and compel your audience to react through the idea itself, and then figuring out what the best representative of that idea may be, and bringing it to life.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You risk working with this director, you risk making this movie, you risk working with another actor you don’t know. It makes your heart beat faster. And it keeps you interested.” – Kevin Spacey
- “You’ve got to trust the ground you’re standing on and the work you’ve done in telling your story. The goal should be to bring those thousands of people – viewers – together and make them one. When you feel that happening, it’s usually in silence, not applause or laughter.” – Kevin Spacey