LOS ANGELES, June 30 — Kevin Spacey, the two-time Oscar-winning actor whose career collapsed in 2017 amid a cascade of sexual misconduct allegations, sat down with Bill Maher on Monday and offered a striking analogy for the scandal: it was, he said, a small kitchen fire. “Oh, I never said there was no fire,” Spacey told Maher on the “Club Random” podcast. “It just wasn’t a raging forest fire.
It was a small kitchen fire that could have been put out with an extinguisher.” The actor fell from grace after Anthony Rapp, known for roles in “Rent” and “Star Trek: Discovery,” alleged that Spacey hit on him sexually when Rapp was 14. Harry Dreyfuss, son of actor Richard Dreyfuss, also accused Spacey of groping and said it happened while his dad was in the room.
Against this backdrop, Spacey’s Hollywood career was devastated. He was fired from his Netflix series “House of Cards” and replaced by Christopher Plummer in the Ridley Scott film “All The Money In The World.” Yet Spacey was keen to tout his legal record. He was found not liable for battery in Rapp’s civil case, and a jury in London found him not guilty of nine criminal charges of sexual assault from four complainants.
“We’ve won in every court we’ve gone into with a jury,” he told Maher. Maher was not entirely convinced.
“Look, I’m not going to lie to you, I go by numbers with scandals,” he said. “There’s too much smoke to be no fire.” Spacey admitted as much. “I hit on a lot of guys,” he said.
The actor also suggested that the scandals that have followed him for nearly a decade would have been handled differently if he belonged to a different world. “If I had been a sports figure, I would have been benched for seven games,” Spacey said. In the corridors of Hollywood, where reputations are currency, Spacey’s return remains a fraught question.
He told Maher he now feels “much more welcomed” and believes things are moving “in the direction that we hoped they were moving in.” What is at stake is not merely one man’s career, but the wider picture of how an industry reckons with allegations that have already reshaped its power structures. For now, Spacey’s small-fire defence is being heard — but the smoke, as Maher noted, has not entirely cleared.
