Kevin Spacey was in town the other week to promote “Now: In the Wings on a World Stage,” his fine new documentary about his tour around the world in “Richard III.”
He took some time out to teach a master class at Juilliard, where I caught up with him. I didn’t take the class — if you saw me in “Smash,” you know I don’t need acting lessons — but I wanted to talk to him about his alma mater, which he attended in 1979. As it turns out, he was teaching the class in room 304, the very room in which he took his first Shakespeare class, taught by the great Marian Seldes.
“I actually met her three weeks before class,” he said. “I was on the corner of 55th and Seventh with Val Kilmer. Val was in his third year at Juilliard. He said, ‘See that woman over there in purple? That’s Marian Seldes. She’ll be your Shakespeare teacher.’”
Kilmer introduced them. Seldes unfolded her long arms, took Spacey’s head in her hands and said, “Oh, my angel!” Then she darted across the street, oblivious to traffic.
“She was a great teacher,” Spacey says. “And for the first five years of my career, she attended every single little off-Broadway play I did. You’d look out into the audience, and there she was, this enthusiastic shadow.”
“Now” offers a rare glimpse of a great actor scaling the heights of a great role. “You do a movie or a TV show and once it’s been shot, your performance can never be better,” Spacey says. “In the theater, I can be better the next night. I wanted to make a movie that answers the question, ‘Why theater?’ And the is because that is where we learn our craft.”
Spacey says his two years as Richard III are the reason he is so effective as Frank Underwood: The “House of Cards” character is based on Richard and, like him, Underwood addresses the audience.
Spacey has a year to go on his 10-year contract as artistic director of the Old Vic in London. He wants to star in one more major production before he leaves, probably another Shakespeare, which he hopes to bring to Broadway next year.
In the meantime, he begins shooting Season 3 of “House of Cards” in June in Baltimore. Its popularity continues to astonish him.
“I cannot walk down the street without somebody coming up to me and saying, ‘Thanks for sucking three days out of my life.’
“Hey, I didn’t tell you to go off and binge watch!”