Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey is planning his return to the big screen. In a move that’s turning heads and raising eyebrows, The Usual Suspects actor has lined up his next film project after he was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen young men in 2017. In the movie, called L’uomo che Disegnò Dio (The Man Who Drew God), Spacey will star as a detective investigating a wrongly accused pedophile, The Telegraph reports.
The film — Spacey’s first since 2018’s Billionaire Boys Club — comes from Italian director Franco Nero, who will also play a blind artist who can recreate people’s exact physical traits simply from hearing their voices who gets accused of pedophilia. It will also star Franco’s wife, actress Vanessa Redgrave.
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The movie will soon begin filming in Italy after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s a true story, the story of a man who, though blind, creates a sculpture of people’s faces,” Nero said in an interview. “Among the actors, I made contact with Kevin Spacey. I’d have been very happy to bring him back on to a film set. We’re waiting for the end of the pandemic to pick up from where our preparatory work was interrupted.”
Spacey was publicly accused by Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp of initiating unwanted sexual advances in 1985 when Rapp was only 14. Following those accusations, many more young men came forward with their own accounts of assault. Spacey vehemently denied all of the accusations.
Following the backlash against Spacey, the once-celebrated actor was fired from the final season of the Netflix hit series House of Cards and was digitally removed from Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World and replaced by Christopher Plummer. Scott explained that his decision to do so was merely business. “My decision was almost immediate,” he told The Guardian. “I said, ‘We need to redo this,’” he recalls. “I didn’t agonise. I never dwell on a problem, only the solution.”
Scott said that while he got on well with Spacey during filming, he feared that the disgraced actor’s involvement would make the film radioactive. “At some point, somebody will say, ‘Let’s not put the film out,’” Scott said. “It would infect the movie to the extent that we’d eventually decide not to sell it.” The allegations against Spacey have not gone away, so we’ll see if Nero faces the same dilemma.
