Last Sunday, Kevin Spacey was to be found on stage in a nightclub in Cyprus, singing That’s Life and Bridge over Troubled Water to an audience who had paid up to €1200 ($2480)
for the privilege.

Kevin Spacey? Really? The winner of two Academy Awards, star of countless films, Frank Underwood in House of Cards? He has had his ups and downs over the years, from acclaim to cancellation. Few might have predicted this, but there he was, in the Monte Caputo club, on stage in a tuxedo and bow tie, backed by a six-piece band, singing a collection of standards from the American songbook and a few more. Among them, the song, as he would tell me, that speaks most vividly to his life over the past seven years – Who Can I Turn To? – which, given all he has been through, seemed particularly apt.

Monte Caputo, a 1300-capacity venue on the outskirts of the resort of Limassol, has played host to tribute acts to Queen and AC/DC, and even to Dara Ó Briain, billed here, improbably, as “one of the funniest men in the world”.

This event was promoted as Kevin Spacey: Songs & Stories, for one performance only, “an unforgettable night of music, memories and showmanship with one of the most iconic performers of our time”. Seats priced from €250, with a special VIP platinum package, including a 30-minute “meet and greet”, at €1200. The dress code specified “cocktail”.

He had arrived at the club that afternoon for a rehearsal, striding in dressed in striped white trousers, a corduroy jacket, a polo shirt and beach shoes, the actor as jazzer it seemed, used to being noticed, with nothing tentative about his manner.

For a couple of hours Spacey and the band worked on a number or two, but much of the time was taken up by problems with the sound – too much echo, that high ringing thing on the piano mic – Spacey pacing the stage impatiently, speaking sharply to a stage hand who had been noticed filming on his phone. At length we adjourned to the dressing room, where he opened a can of Coke.

Why this show, and why now, I ask.

For him, singing, he says, has always been “like a second language”. While his father, a technical writer and failed novelist, abused and beat him, his mother cultivated a love for the music, playing records by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett and encouraging his ambitions to go on the stage – the 8-year-old with stars in his eyes.

He performed in high school musicals. In 2004, he directed and starred in Beyond The Sea, a biopic about the singer Bobby Darin, singing all the songs himself. Over the years, in clubs or lounges, he joined bands on stage to sing a song or two. In 2015, when Billy Joel was awarded the Gershwin Prize, he accompanied the singer-songwriter in a rendition of Piano Man.

He had never sung like this before, in a show like this, a club like this, to an audience like this. And certainly not in Cyprus.

But the promoter knew somebody who knew somebody, who got in touch and asked whether Spacey would be interested, and here he was.

“There’s going to be people who will speculate whether this is some design plan, but that isn’t the way my career happened, and it’s not the way this next chapter is going to happen.

“The last seven years have offered me a lot of opportunity to reflect and be reminded of what I’m grateful for, and the people in my life. So the idea of combining stories on some level, along with music, and in many cases music that I’ve never done before, songs I’ve never sung but I’ve wanted to – maybe in the shower, but never on a stage. So it just sort of happened when I wanted to see, can I get up and sing for my supper again?”

There were supposed to be three shows – as he puts it, “getting our feet wet in a city that’s not London or New York” – one in Cyprus, then Athens, then Tel Aviv. But the show in Athens has been cancelled – not, it seems, because of the scandal that has haunted Spacey for the past seven years, but for political reasons. As far as he knew, he says, the promoter had cancelled the show fearing that his staff might not turn up. The far reach of the Gaza problem.

“It was suggested that if we wanted to continue with Athens we should not be playing Tel Aviv right after. I would love to play Athens when they are more accepting of the fact that they should not be in the position of telling someone where they can and cannot perform. And I’m delighted to play in Tel Aviv.”

The past seven years…

Spacey has talked of what he describes as the lowest point of his life in November 2017, after an actor named Anthony Rapp gave an interview to Buzzfeed in which he accused Spacey of sexually assaulting him in 1986, when both were relatively unknown actors.

At the time of the allegation, Spacey was starring in House of Cards, the Netflix series which had taken him to the very summit of international fame. He was immediately dropped from the show. Then came the cancellations, the gossip, the tabloid scandalising – talking of which he grows visibly angry – and the lawsuits. In 2022, it took a jury little more than one hour to find that he did not sexually abuse Rapp.

The following year, in London, Spacey was acquitted on all charges of sexual assaults on four men.

The cloud of scandal can blow up in a single day, and take years to disperse.

But he says that now he feels that it’s “in my rear-view mirror”. For a long time, Spacey became invisible – there was no work. It would be wrong to think he had been cast into purdah – by Hollywood and the film industry perhaps, but not, he says, by the people who were always closest to him.

“Now, there may be individuals that made decisions that I don’t think were fair, based on what they thought they knew at the time… The fact that a whole bunch of people in Hollywood that I had relations with were an inch thick, OK. But my friends, my colleagues, my family – I have not felt isolated at all.

“But, also, it’s been incredibly positive. To have an opportunity to stop, look at my life, ask questions.”

He pauses.

“Why was I such a good villain, why did I fit so well into a narrative that was out there? And some of those were important questions for me to ask, to take accountability for where I made mistakes.”

While the public knew him on the screen, Spacey had always purposefully ensured they knew as little as possible about him off it. “I was secretive, no one knew about me, I protected my privacy. It was Fort Knox. People didn’t really know me, so it was very easy for people to stick a lot of labels on me that just were not true.

“Do I think the media was interested in not the truth but in creating a villain? Yes. I suppose when I look back, I wish I had spoken out sooner and allowed my voice to be heard more. I have recognised that I did certain things, I made certain decisions that I thought was protecting my work as an actor, but in fact it was also protecting the issues that I had about myself, that I was not kind to myself about.”

He is talking about his sexuality. “And I think that I’m now so grateful that I’ve been given an opportunity to re-examine, to question and to move to a new place in my life where I have nothing to hide. I am free from a lot of things I was not free from that were my own issues.”

In the immediate aftermath of Rapp’s allegations, having kept his private life like Fort Knox, Spacey made what amounted to almost a forced confession on social media that he was gay.

“It’s the way it happened,” he says, “but it’s not the way it was planned. I was on that road to get to that place prior to the s— hitting the fan. And it happened in a way that was very unexpected, and you virtually have very little you can do to try and control it and stop it. It’s like an avalanche.”

Does he feel he was caught up in a witch hunt?

“Well, that proposes that people were deliberately doing something that they knew was false. I think it’s easy for people to decide how they feel about something without even putting an ounce of energy into actually investigating the truth. Do I think journalists write stories that are deliberately mean and unnecessary, and untrue? Yes.

“But I have never felt that way about the public, who have talked to me, been supportive, said the most incredible things when they’ve stopped me in the street.

“I have always felt the public was on my side, and understood what had happened, and were not buying into things that they were reading. And I have always been enormously grateful for that.”

He tells a story about Jack Lemmon, an early mentor who became a close friend. In 1986, they performed together in Long Day’s Journey into Night in London – Lemmon the star, Spacey a relative unknown. “After the matinee, Jack and I walked to the Savoy, where he was staying, and he must have been stopped 35 times as we walked down the Strand. People wanted pictures, ‘Jack Lemmon!’, and he was, ‘Hey, how you doing?’, and signing things, and I said to him, ‘Does that bother you? You must have been stopped many times.’ And he said, ‘Listen, a—hole, try to remember this if you ever become famous. It might be my 65th time, but it’s their first.’

“And that was such a beautiful way to recognise that it wasn’t about him, it was about them. And I wish that I had kept that closer to my heart in my own experience with fame.”

He continues: “Even though I tried not to be a jerk, I think that to some degree I always was a jerk, because people were stopping and I always had somewhere to go, and I think I was always putting people in lanes – he wants this, she wants that, something from me. But now my relationship with fame is very much changed, and I’m back to that ‘twist of Lemmon’, as I like to call it. Because now I’m so pleased to be able to take the time to meet people and have conversations with them. I’m stopped all the time in many different places, in many different circumstances, and people are so kind and so generous.”

“And I think that was not correct to put people in lanes, and not right to remember what Lemmon said, which was, it’s about them, not about you. And that’s been such a delightful readjustment to fame in the last seven years. I’m so much happier and more comfortable. I’m not putting a hat on and ducking out of buildings. I’m walking with my head high, no glasses on my face, no hat, nothing to hide.”

If there has been a single theme of his recent encounters with the public, he says, it has been this one: “When are you getting back to work?”

But while Hollywood has been shunning him for the past seven years, something interesting has happened. First-time film-makers, emerging talent – people, as he puts it, “that would never have got through the door at CAA” (Spacey’s agents, who dropped him like a hot potato two days after the allegations against him were made) – have approached Spacey wanting to work with him.

Over the past three years he has made six films; one, Holiguards, an action thriller that he directed himself. But Hollywood has failed to call.

“We are in touch with some extremely powerful people who want to put me back to work,” he says. “And that will happen in its right time. But I will also say what I think the industry seems to be waiting for is to be given permission – by someone who is in some position of enormous respect and authority.”

At the time that scandal engulfed Spacey, he had been living in Baltimore, Maryland, for 12 years. But at the moment, he says, he doesn’t live anywhere.

He lost his house, “because the costs over these last seven years have been astronomical. I’ve had very little coming in and everything going out”.

But, he says: “You get through it. In weird ways, I feel I’m back to where I first started, which is I just went where the work was. Everything is in storage, and I hope at some point, if things continue to improve, that I’ll be able to decide where I want to settle down again.

“I’m living in hotels, I’m living in Airbnbs, I’m going where the work is. I literally have no home, that’s what I’m attempting to explain.”

What is his financial situation?

“Not great.”

Did he fear bankruptcy?

“It was discussed, but it never got to that point.”

He compares his cancellation to the blacklisting of writers, actors and directors in Hollywood in the 1950s for alleged communist sympathies, “when a lot of people were not guilty of what they were accused of”.

The most celebrated screenwriter of that period was Dalton Trumbo, who was forced to write scripts pseudonymously, including The Brave One, for which he won an Academy Award he was unable to claim. In 1958, he was hired by the producer Otto Preminger to write the script for Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas.

“When he said, ‘Dalton Trumbo’s name is going on Spartacus,’ everyone around him said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re going to get cancelled,’” Spacey says. “And Kirk Douglas said, ‘You know what, we get to play the hero in movies, but it’s not that simple in life.’ He was willing to stand up and say enough is enough. The moment he did that, the blacklist was over.

“So, my feeling is if Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino call Evan [Lowenstein, Spacey’s manager] tomorrow, it will be over. I will be incredibly honoured and delighted when that level of talent picks up the phone.”

He takes a swig of his Coke, and pauses. “And I believe it’s going to happen.”

Local Cypriot news photographers have assembled for his arrival at the club that evening. Buckets of Moët and plates of fruit and cold cuts have been set on the VIP tables.

At the back of a room, a small stage has been set for a large picture of Spacey, flanked by two colossal hardboard Oscars, where guests stand for pictures.

I ask a man in the VIP section, a local real estate developer, how he would describe the audience. He points to the neighbouring seats. Mostly real estate developers, he says – “The only people who could afford them.”

There are Russians – of whom there are a lot in Cyprus – who are accommodated by Russian subtitles being shown on the screens flanking the stage for Spacey’s stories.

People have been drawn by curiosity, by the wattage of celebrity that Spacey offers – “This is the biggest thing that’s happened in Cyprus in years,” one person says – and simply because they are fans. There are people who have flown from Athens to see him, and a couple who have come from north London specially for the show, the man who loved his films, the woman who had seen every performance he had given on stage when he was director of the Old Vic.

Nobody mentions the scandal, nobody is bothered – “He was acquitted! Isn’t that enough?” says one guest; there were people in Cyprus who were completely unaware of it, another man tells me – this isn’t Britain or the United States. “People don’t read the tabloids here.”

By show time the venue is packed to the rafters.

As Spacey himself points out, you don’t find venues like this in London, New York or even Vegas anymore. And it feels as if you have stepped back into the Sixties. Indeed, you could see the show as some sort of fulfilment of the dreams Spacey might have conjured since childhood, listening to Sinatra, Fitzgerald and Bennett – at the Sands, perhaps, or the Desert Inn. The theatrical entrance from the back of the house, down the aisle to the stage, nodding and smiling as the applause swells; the big voice projected into the farthest reaches of the room, the songs a mixture of the showstopping and the sentimental. Soft-shoe shuffles, wry jokes and jabs at the audience as another champagne cork pops in the platinum seats – “Is everybody here drunk?” – and calling for a waiter to bring him Jack Daniels and ice.

He starts The Very Thought of You, then stops after a couple of bars, saying, “I’m sorry but I’m out of key” (applause), and starts again.

He sings Ol’ Man River and That’s Life, his voice soaring for the punchline, “Each time I find myself flat on my face / I pick myself up and get back in the race.”

He tells stories about growing up, and of how as a child his mother passed him a ketchup bottle, saying, “Pretend this is an Oscar and learn how to hold it, because when you grow up, you’re going to win one of these.” (More applause.)

He tells the story about how as an aspiring actor he had studied with Val Kilmer at Juilliard and they had worked together in spear-carrying roles on Broadway, and how in 2017 when a number of people were running away from him, “Val was running towards me in friendship and support” (more applause); and the story he’d told me earlier about Jack Lemmon, and how much it meant for him to be here tonight, and that he’d like to dedicate this next song, Who Can I Turn To?, to “you, the audience” (rapturous applause).

He finishes with the song that Bobby Darin would always sing to close his act, The Curtain Falls, “Off comes the makeup / Off comes the clown’s disguise / The curtain’s fallin’ / The music softly dies / But I hope you’re smilin’…”

There are two standing ovations. And one could almost imagine him after the show, retiring to the restaurant with Frank, Dean and Sammy to eat lobster and down a few more Jacks with ice.

But still there is the meet-and-greet downstairs with the VIP platinum guests. Not, it transpires, for 30 minutes. For almost an hour, Spacey poses for photographs, chatting and signing autographs with a smile for everybody, until the last person has been satisfied. And Spacey thinking, perhaps, of that Lemmon story – about how it may be his 65th time but it’s their first. And grinning as if he was 8 years old again.