Kevin Spacey denies Guy Pearce harassment allegations: 'Grow up!'

Article content

Kevin Spacey is firing back at Guy Pearce after his L.A. Confidential co-star accused him of harassment during the filming of the 1997 crime thriller.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast, Pearce, whose work in The Brutalist is up for an Oscar next month, recounted his experience working with Spacey, who has faced numerous charges of sexual harassment and assault dating back decades, all of which he has denied and been found innocent of.

“I was sort of scared of Kevin because he’s quite an aggressive man,” Pearce, 57, said. “He’s extremely charming and brilliant at what he does — really impressive, etc. He holds a room remarkably. But I was young and susceptible, and he targeted me, no question.”

Spacey’s acting career ground to a halt in 2017 after Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp alleged that the two-time Oscar winner sexually assaulted him when he was 14 and Spacey was 26.

In the midst of an Emmy-nominated run for his role as Francis Underwood in House of Cards, Spacey, now 65, was dropped from the Netflix drama and scrubbed from All the Money in the World, with director Ridley Scott replacing him with actor Christopher Plummer.

During a subsequent trial, Rapp testified that Spacey had invited him to his apartment for a party, then approached him in a bedroom after the other guests left. He said the actor, then 26, picked him up and briefly laid on top of him on a bed.

But a jury sided with Spacey in 2022, deciding that Rapp hadn’t proven his allegations.

The verdict followed another case in 2019 which saw prosecutors in Massachusetts drop criminal charges against Spacey after he was accused of indecent assault and battery involving an 18-year-old man in a bar in 2016. 

Spacey was also acquitted in 2023 of sexually assaulting four other men while working as the artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre.

When Pearce heard the parade of charges being levelled against Spacey, he “broke down and sobbed.”

“I couldn’t stop,” Pearce recalled in his conversation with THR. “I think it really dawned on me the impact that had occurred and how I sort of brushed it off and how I had either shelved it or blocked it out or whatever. That was a really incredible wake-up call I suppose … Even though I probably was a victim to a degree; I was certainly not a victim by any means to the extent that other people have been to sexual predators.”

But Spacey has clapped back at Pearce for airing his assertions “in the media.”

“We worked together a long time ago, if I did something then that upset you, you could’ve reached out to me, we could’ve had that conversation,” Spacey said in a video shared to X. “But instead, you decided to speak to the press, who of course are now coming after me because they’d like to know what my response is to the things that you said. You really want to know what my response is? Grow up.”

Spacey went on to suggest that Pearce visited him while he was filming the Clint Eastwood-directed thriller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil a year after they shot L.A.Confidential.

“Did you tell the press that, too? Or does that not fit into the victim narrative you have going? I apologize that I didn’t get the message that you don’t like spending time with me. Maybe there was another reason, I don’t know,” Spacey said in his video, which has been viewed more than 6.1 million times.

Spacey wondered aloud why Pearce was making his accusations now, after all these years.

“Here you are now on a mission, some 28 years later, after I’ve been through hell and back to do what? Just in time to stop the bad guy. Is that what’s going on here? What took you so long? Did your horse run out of gas?” Spacey concluded. “I mean, you want to have a conversation, I’m happy to do so anytime, any place. We can even do it here live on X if you’d like, I’ve got nothing to hide. But Guy, you need to grow up. You are not a victim.”

Despite being found innocent of all criminal charges, Spacey has continued to be shunned by Hollywood. But some of his fellow acting colleagues, including Sharon Stone and Liam Neeson, have come to his defence and publicly called for his return. 

In statements given to The Telegraph last year, Stone and Neeson said Spacey should be given a chance to act again.

“I can’t wait to see Kevin back at work. He is a genius. He is so elegant and fun, generous to a fault and knows more about our craft than most of us ever will,” Stone told the publication.

Neeson told the paper that Spacey was a “good man and a man of character.”

Succession star Brian Cox also decried Spacey’s fall from grace.

“Kevin is an old friend of mine. All right, Kevin did certain things… He also did a lot of extraordinary work,” Cox recently told The i Paper. “And I find that really petty, and I just don’t like it. It’s sneaky and petty and not right.”

mdaniell@postmedia.com