Brian Cox defended Kevin Spacey in a new interview with U.K. publication The i Paper, calling the Oscar winner “an old friend of mine” and asking the public: “How dare you cancel anybody?” Spacey has not worked in Hollywood since being accused by several men of sexual misconduct starting in 2017.
“Kevin is an old friend of mine,” Cox said. “All right, Kevin did certain things… He also did a lot of extraordinary work. And I find that really petty, and I just don’t like it. It’s sneaky and petty and not right”.
“Not everybody is abusive. I’ve never found Kevin Spacey abusive,” he continued. “He was misguided, certainly, in terms of his sexuality, but that’s to do with him coming to terms with his own sexuality and how he’s dealt with that, and the dilemma that it’s caused in his life”
“We’ve got to an age now where people are going, ‘Oh, that’s bad, he’s out, boom, he’s cancelled,’” Cox concluded. “What do you mean ‘cancelled’? How dare you cancel anybody?”
Since claims of Spacey’s alleged inappropriate behavior and sexual assault first arose in the wake of the #MeToo movement in 2017, several legal cases have been brought against the two-time Oscar winner. In 2022, a jury in New York concluded that he did not molest actor Anthony Rapp, who had accused him of sexual assault in the early 1980s when Rapp was 14. The next year, a U.K. court found Spacey not guilty of nine charges of sexual assault from four complainants. Several other charges and lawsuits have been dropped. Spacey has denied all the allegations.
The two-part documentary “Spacey Unmasked” aired last year and featured previously unheard of testimonies about Spacey’s alleged sexual misconduct, including a claim that he allegedly groped another “House of Cards” actor on set. Another claim accused Spacey of making an “aggressive sexual move” on a classmate in high school.
Amid the rollout of “Spacey Unmasked,” actors such as Sharon Stone and Liam Neeson gave statements to The Telegraph calling for Spacey’s return to the film industry at large.
“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 Telegraph, adding that it was clear aspiring actors “wanted and want to be around him.”
“It’s terrible that they are blaming him for not being able to come to terms with themselves for using him and negotiating with themselves because they didn’t get their secret agendas,” Stone added.
Neeson told the publication he “was deeply saddened to learn of these accusations against” Spacey, but added: “Kevin is a good man and a man of character. He’s sensitive, articulate and non-judgmental, with a terrific sense of humor. He is also one of our finest artists in the theatre and on camera. Personally speaking, our industry needs him and misses him greatly.”
Spacey himself slammed the documentary in an interview with journalist Dan Wootton, where he also lamented being shut out of the industry by saying: “Nobody in Hollywood has ever presented a path back for me. There’s no coursework material. I’ve been given no boxes to check, no nothing. It seems that some are content with just canceling me forever. It’s a life sentence.”
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