Kevin Spacey’s Tearful Return to the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m Still Standing”
According to cinemadrame News Agency, Kevin Spacey appeared this Tuesday at a side event of the 78th Cannes Film Festival (Better World Fund Gala) to receive an honorary award. The Oscar-winning actor has been accused of several instances of sexual harassment since 2017 and was acquitted in two trials held in New York and London in 2022 and 2023. At the beginning of the “MeToo” movement, he was fired from the series “House of Cards” and has rarely joined any projects since then.
Upon receiving the award, Spacey gave a lively speech on stage, recalling: “Who would have thought that honoring someone who has been acquitted in all their trials would be a brave concept? But it has happened.”
The actor from “American Beauty” and “Se7en” compares his fate to that of Dalton Trumbo, an Oscar-winning screenwriter who was blacklisted in 1950 for alleged communist affiliations. He then recalled that an actor like Kirk Douglas supported Trumbo, who wrote the screenplay for “Spartacus.”
Spacey says: “It goes back many, many years, but let’s think about the backlash against [Douglas], after his courageous decision to support his colleague, a two-time Oscar-nominated writer, Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted from 1947 to 1960. He was blacklisted, do you know what that means? For thirteen years, he couldn’t work. But even after they warned [Douglas] that if he hired Trumbo as the writer for ‘Spartacus’ in 1960, he would be considered a communist sympathizer, and his career and reputation would be ruined, Kirk Douglas took that risk and said: ‘It’s better for us actors to play the hero on screen. We fight villains and stand up for justice. But in real life, decisions are not always so clear. Sometimes, you have to stand by your ethical principles.'”
Spacey continued: “I’ve learned many lessons from history – it often repeats itself. The blacklist era in our history was terrible, we must not forget it, so it doesn’t happen again.”
The 65-year-old actor added that during that “long and dark” period, the lives of 475 other individuals, along with Trumbo, were “destroyed by false accusations. And today, we find ourselves again at the crossroads of doubt and fear in the filmmaking industry and beyond.”
Spacey concluded his speech by quoting his friend Elton John’s song “I’m Still Standing.” On the red carpet of the event, he told reporters: “I find myself surrounded by a lot of kindness and love. Many friends, colleagues, and co-stars contacted me over the past week when the announcement of this award was made.”
The producers of Spacey’s latest film, “The Awakening,” which is being sold at the festival, had previously told “Variety” that their goal for holding this event was “guerrilla marketing” and creating controversy.
