Charlie Rose Transcript
13 October, 2005

 CHARLIE ROSE: Welcome to the broadcast.  From our recent trip to London, a conversation with Kevin Spacey.  He`s the artistic director of the Old Vic.  In its second season, he has the lead role in "Richard II" and winning critics` praise.

 (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KEVIN SPACEY, ACTOR: What we`ve done is we have began the Old Vic theater company. It is a brand new company. And it`s not easy to begin theatrical beginnings, but we`ve had a pretty remarkable first year. 

If I come here and I have a successful time, and two years after I leave the theater closes, I will have failed.  What I want, what I`m doing, every decision I make, every decision our company is making together is about making sure that we build it for a successor...

CHARLIE ROSE:  So that...

KEVIN SPACEY:  And toward a theater company that will last long beyond my...

CHARLIE ROSE:  The theater has its own legs.

KEVIN SPACEY:  The theater has always had its own legs. 

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLIE ROSE:  We end with Leslie Cauley.  She is a journalist who has written a book about AT&T, called "The End of the Line."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

LESLIE CAULEY, AUTHOR, "END OF THE LINE":  The beginning of the end for AT&T during the Armstrong years, the Waterloo, Mike Armstrong`s Waterloo in my view was the MediaOne deal, and the MediaOne deal, not the fact he was trying to get cable assets, but the manner in which this transaction was financed. And the way it was financed, it was predicated on everything going well.  It was done at the top of the Internet bubble, when all systems were -- all systems were go, the markets were hot, things were going well, but they predicated it on everything going right.  There was no consideration then for what might happen if things go wrong, and in fact everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and AT&T in short order found itself looking at a major liquidity crunch.  It was in a financial crisis.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHARLIE ROSE:  Kevin Spacey, Leslie Cauley, coming up.  

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CHARLIE ROSE:  Kevin Spacey is here. In 2004, he became artistic director of the historic Old Vic theater in London.  He is currently starring as the troubled British monarch in "Richard II," which is the opening production of the theater`s new season.  The role also marks Spacey`s British Shakespearean debut.  I`m pleased to have him back on this program and especially here in London.  Welcome, Kevin.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Welcome to the United Kingdom. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Nice to see you.

KEVIN SPACEY:  I`m not sure I ever thought I`d say that to you. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Nice to see you, King Richard.  It`s a pleasure. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Thank you.

CHARLIE ROSE:  I want to talk about coming to the Old Vic, but this is something you have dreamed of doing for a while, being artistic director of a great theater.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah. It hit me in really the end of 2000. I was here opening "American Beauty" for the London Film Festival, and I had asked Sally Greene, who is our great land lady at the Old Vic, who really saved this theater, if she could.... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  And other things around London, too. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  And other things around London. She`s now running Ronny Scott`s one of the great jazz clubs.

I asked her if she would organize an evening where a lot of people from the arts, actors and writers and directors and people from media and all over would come and have a sort of free-flowing discussion about what they thought the Old Vic could be when it was at its best, what they thought its future might be, and this is before the idea of coming and actually running it myself happened.  And it was sort of this evening -- I walked away from it feeling that whether anyone actually said it or not, the impression I got was that the Old Vic was at its best when it was an actors` theater. When you look back at its history, some of the greatest actors of their time played this stage. Gielgud and Olivier and Richard Burton and Judi Dench made her debut there, and Maggie Smith and I mean, the list is... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  It was known as the home of Shakespeare in London.

 KEVIN SPACEY: It was, because of Lillian Baylis, who was the Sally Greene of her day.

 CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, 40 years -- right.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And although I`m happy to say that Sally Greene does not cook bacon in the boxes, as Lillian Baylis apparently did.  You knew when she was in the house if the smell of bacon was wafting through the stalls. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  At the Old Vic?

KEVIN SPACEY:  At the Old Vic, yeah. And what happened to me literally is I was at a point in my career where I had about, you know, I don`t know, eight or nine years in making movies. It had gone better for me than I could have ever imagined, and I asked myself what am I going to do for the next 10 years of my life? Am I going to continue this kind of slightly nomadic lifestyle when you`re in hotel rooms and you`re in various locations, and you`re making movie after movie after movie and occasionally try to squeeze a play in? And I thought, no, I think I would rather do it the other way around.  I think I`d rather do play after play after play, and occasionally squeeze a movie in.

 So I made a decision then, at the end of 2000, that I wanted to come and be the artistic director. And Sally agreed and the board agreed. And so we kept it a secret until 2003.  So I was running around functioning as a board member, but in fact I was staffing, I was finding our producer and raising money and doing a lot of stuff that you have to do to prepare for a first season.  And then I moved here coming on three years ago this April, and we had our first season last year, and it went incredibly well. 

You know, it`s not easy to create, you know, maybe people might think I stepped into a role that had existed, but the truth is that, really, with two exceptions, which was Peter Hull came for a period of time and Jonathan Miller came for a period of time, after Laurence Olivier left the National Theater, the National Theater was at the Old Vic for 14 seasons while they were building their building on the South Bank -- and so the theater had gone through a kind of checkered past over the last 30 years of it being more of a receiving house than a producing theater company.

So what we`ve done is we`ve began the Old Vic theater company. It is a brand new company, and it`s not easy to begin theatrical beginnings, but we`ve had a pretty remarkable first year. You know, we`ve had over a quarter of a million people come into our doors, and luckily for us they stopped at the box office and they bought tickets and came in. We`ve had a remarkable amount of young students come in, because I continued the same policy I had on "Iceman," where we had 100 seats at 12 pounds for under 25s.

CHARLIE ROSE:  I should make note, you came here, "Iceman" was what, 1986 or something?

KEVIN SPACEY:  "Iceman" was in `98. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  `98 was "Iceman."

KEVIN SPACEY:  We did it at the Almeda originally, then we moved it to the Old Vic, which was my first experience working there and when I really fell in love with it, and then we took it to Broadway after that in `99.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So you get here and you`ve got to not only think about, well, how many performances, how many plays am I going to perform in, but also how am I going to choose what we`re going to present? I mean, what`s the guiding philosophy? Other than to make this alive, make this original, make this, you know, and at the same time be mindful of its history?

 KEVIN SPACEY: Yes. You know, I talked to a lot of previous artistic directors of other institutions, as well as people that had worked at the Vic, and whenever you ask someone what is your artistic policy, you know, you kind of expect a very deep and meaningful response, but what you generally get is I did the plays I wanted to do.

So in a sense you do the plays that you want to do.  I think my mission with David Liddiment, our producer, and Sally in this first season was, let us just try to do what we think is interesting, refreshing, different work that you can`t see on any other stage in London. Let`s try to return the Old Vic as a destination. 

Let`s not set ourselves the goal of trying to reach the kind of historical significance that the Old Vic has in our first season. We`re never going to do it. 

 The truths is I also think now that I`m in "Richard II," you know, being an actor and working in this particular medium, it`s a little bit like being an athlete, you know.  I wouldn`t have been ready to do "Richard II" a year ago. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Why not?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Because I think that the work I`ve done this year, both in terms of the day-to-day job of being an artistic director, the day-to-day job of thinking about seasons three and three and four and five and beyond is one part of it.  The other part is the work I`ve done as an actor, with the directors that I`ve worked with and the plays that I`ve worked on. It`s a bit like you need to go into training.

 So I know that now I feel more prepared to have done "Richard II" than I would have a year ago, and I think also one of the reasons why I wanted to do "Richard" was because Trevor Nunn, who directed it, one of the -- probably the premiere Shakespearean director certainly of his time, is that he had never directed the play.

CHARLIE ROSE:  The two of you could learn together. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah, it would be an opportunity to...

 CHARLIE ROSE: Explore together. 

 KEVIN SPACEY: ... to explore together.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yeah, but here`s the interesting thing, too, is that when it first came out, they said -- somebody wrote this -- they said, when I read that Kevin was doing "Richard II," I thought that`s a typo. He`s doing "Richard III," not "Richard II."

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, you know, Charlie, I like doing the unexpected, and I don`t necessarily like to do things that are the obvious.  And there were a lot of choices.  Trevor and I spent about three-and-a-half years talking about what we might do, and ultimately "Richard II" fascinated me, because it`s a play about power.  It`s a play about public versus private. It raises all the questions of monarchy, that are, you know, circling around in people`s minds even today.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Sure.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And I also think that because Trevor`s rendition of it, his conception of it was to make it a modern play, as if there were a parallel...

 CHARLIE ROSE: You mean by modern, in modern dress, modern times.

 KEVIN SPACEY: Modern dress, modern times.  We have a great use of video. In a sense, it`s examining how the television camera, how spin, how someone gets their story out, how repeated images are used to convince people of one side or the other. And it`s a remarkably powerful plan. I think people are probably getting a lot of parallels to today`s politics.  

 CHARLIE ROSE: Now, when you`re doing this -- I want to talk about "Richard II" a lot, but when you`re doing this, you go to the office in the morning and think about what`s going to be on the rest of the season, because you`ve got an Arthur Miller play coming in here...

 KEVIN SPACEY: Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  ... directed by Robert Altman.  And you`ve got a whole range of other things that you`re -- are you spending part of your day with your artistic director`s hat on, and part of your day thinking about my performance tonight and how I could be better than I was last night, or what I might add to it and?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes.  My days are sort of cut up into three different areas right now.  Because I spend a lot of time with respect to figuring out how we want our seasons to go.  A lot of it is, is, you know, it`s a little bit like sitting with a jigsaw puzzle, because it`s about trying to find the right pieces.  You know, will this actor slot into this play?  What play does this actor want to do that I have had a lunch with and said, will you come to the Old Vic? It`s talking to a playwright that you`re having, you`ve actually commissioned to write a new work, so you`re waiting for the new work.  It`s meeting with designers.  It`s meeting with -- you know, there`s a lot of that that goes on with respect to what the work is.

On top of that, there is -- the tentacles of running a theater is not just about what goes on stage.  You know, there`s programs, there`s marketing...

CHARLIE ROSE:  You`re doing all of the outreach stuff.

 KEVIN SPACEY: There is a lot of outreach stuff.  We have a big community program, a big educational program as well. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  To bring people in and introduce them to the theater, so that those people who might not ever have seen theater will see it in a way... 

 KEVIN SPACEY: And also, just in terms of its own neighborhood. I mean, we`ve gone out -- surrounding the Old Vic on the South Bank is an enormous amount of low-income housing.  This is housing that Thatcher put in many, many years.  You`ve got an incredible racial mix of families, of different backgrounds and different economics. And most of them are pretty poor. 

 Now, we went around to -- door-to-door, and we discovered that within spitting distance, most of these people have never been in the Old Vic. And I said, well, why not? Why should they perceive the Old Vic as a building where only those wealthy people from the other side of the river come?  So we have brought in...

 CHARLIE ROSE: Or those artist types.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah. So we`ve brought in 1,500 families in the last 11 months from the neighborhood, either at no cost at all, or at huge discounts. We brought in over 900 children into our workshops from these families.  So we`re trying to be inclusive within our neighborhood, and at the same time try to in a sense brand the Old Vic outside its borders of Waterloo.

CHARLIE ROSE:  But are you also at the same time, as you think about the future, going to your friends, say -- a lot of people thought that when you came here, Kevin is going to bring some of his pals from the acting community -- whether they`re movie stars or theater people. People like John Melodic, for example, who`s made his beginning in Steppe wolf and on Broadway. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  And don`t think I haven`t spoken to him. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  I`m sure. See, but that`s the great thing about it.  It is the idea -- you`re now in a position to friends, who you know are good, who you know have always had a longing for theater -- who maybe have been making movies primarily -- and say, is there something you`re obsessed about? Is there something you most -- really want to...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, and it`s also, I think, it`s usually important too -- while -- while that expectation I understand and I always would like to be able to bring people to the theater who both have credibility, who are good at what they do, and might actually sell seats, which is why you want to bring in those kinds of actors at that level.

 But there`s also a very important aspect, too, which is that we`re building a company, and a company has to survive and do well beyond a particular actor being on stage. For example, I`m not going to be in another show this season, because I think it`s hugely important that the theater starts to stand on its own two feet, that eventually the novelty of my being on stage will wear off anyway, because I`m going to be up quite a lot. I mean, just this year, I`ve been on stage 36 weeks by the end of the year.  But I believe it`s important that eventually the Old Vic becomes a destination where people just want to go see what`s on at the Old Vic, regardless of who`s in a play.  It`s what the Royal Court has done, it`s what the Dun mar has done, it`s what the Almeda has done, it`s what the National does. So that takes a while to do. And so my impression of it, my belief is and commitment is, that this is probably a decade-long commitment. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  You also believe -- you went out to do -- you left "Philadelphia Story" to go out and do "Superman..."

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes, exactly.

CHARLIE ROSE:  ... with Sir Ian McClellan, who, because of "Lord of the Rings," had a whole new audience.  That if you can bring people like that, you and him -- if they know you from movies, they may come to the theater for the first time.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Look, I have -- I`ve never had a problem with why people come to the theater. If they come because they have seen someone in movies, I have no problem. Buy the ticket...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Just sit in the seat and have a good time.

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... sit in the seat.  It`s then our job to give them an experience that they won`t forget. And in particular, I think, you know, I can`t emphasize this enough, how hugely important I think it is to reach out to younger audiences.  We`ve got so much competition with respect to entertainment that if you don`t get kids young enough -- 17, 18, 19 years old -- to go to the theater and realize it`s a remarkable experience, that they can have a great time with their pals. It`s better than sitting at home and going through bad television.

CHARLIE ROSE:  It`s a living experience.

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s a living experience. And maybe the next time someone says, hey, you want to go see a play, they won`t make a face.  But they`ll go, yeah, I had a really good time at the Old Vic.

 CHARLIE ROSE: The first year.  There was some criticism of the first year. You take that in stride. You haven`t seen the reviews of "Richard II," which almost unanimously, because I have read seven or eight -- six or seven of them -- have been very, very good. I don`t know what four or five stars mean, but it seems like a lot. 

 KEVIN SPACEY: Well, for a restaurant, that`s pretty good. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  They tend to say good things. But also, I mean, the first year, people questioned your choices, asked you why you did this, questioned -- but you are saying, that was just a learning experience, I`m proud of what we did the first year? 

KEVIN SPACEY:  No...

 CHARLIE ROSE: You don`t quarrel...

KEVIN SPACEY:  I don`t want to quarrel with the fact that sometimes our friends in the aisle will be with us and sometimes they won`t.  I have a different philosophy about why work should be produced. I don`t believe that plays should be looked at strictly from a literary perspective, what is their literary value? I think that there are a lot of reasons to produce plays.  If you want to develop a writer`s work, the best way for a writer to learn and to grow and to become better is to see their work in production. If you want to offer actors wonderful parts, then do something that is entertaining and enjoyable.

I really felt that if I had begun where we had been criticized for not beginning, which is Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, we wouldn`t have had 250,000 people come into our theater.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You wouldn`t.

KEVIN SPACEY:  I don`t think so. Not unless -- not unless we had put a major name into each show, and I think that what we were trying to do is to be refreshing, to in a sense reach out to a slightly different audience with each of the shows that we did.

And it`s perfectly fine that people question what we did.  I think to some degree, there`s somebody who wrote and I don`t remember who it was, but I thought this was pretty funny, that unless I had come riding down Waterloo Road on a white house with Laurence Olivier standing on my shoulders, it wouldn`t have mattered what I did.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You could never be as good as they wanted you to.

 KEVIN SPACEY: And the truth is, I walked into the role realizing that, look, I`m going to come under criticism, and I`m going to come under criticism for a number of reasons. First of all, the stakes are very high.  The Old Vic is just one of those theaters that people have a great passion for and a great feeling about, and I think particularly those who write criticism.  Many of them were around in the 1950s and 1960s when the National Theater was there, so I think there is a memory of what the Old Vic was, and in some way they might want it to be what it was.

But I don`t view it that way.  I think it has to be what it is now, and I think that we have to be entertaining.  If people are going to go out and spend 42 pounds, I want them to walk out of that theater at night saying, that was a really good time.  Now, there is an argument that is made...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Or I haven`t seen that before. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, yes, I hadn`t seen that before. There`s an argument that`s made that I don`t believe -- I don`t cotton to.  Which is that unless a play is great, it`s not worth producing, and I don`t believe it. I think that there are in reality, truly, Charlie, there`s very few great plays, and if your standard of a great play is a Shakespeare play, well, then a lot of plays, you know, after that fall to the wayside.

 I think that there is valuable work, important work to be done. You have to be willing to take chance and you have to be willing to investigate new writing, new work. 

You know, we brought a European writer over, and we`re very proud of having done it, and you know, despite the fact that some of our critics have not been on our side, it hasn`t had a terrible effect on our box office.  So I suppose I look at it this way, which is that my major concern is to develop a relationship with an audience.  We have a 1,000-seat theater.  Without a huge advertising budget, without a huge marketing budget, without a single pound of subsidy from the government. We are a commercial operation, and therefore we have to fill that theater every night, and that`s the relationship that I`m building.

CHARLIE ROSE:  How much of your time do you spend on fund-raising?

 KEVIN SPACEY: Quite a lot, Charlie.  In fact, I`m fund-raising now. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  This is part of it...

KEVIN SPACEY:  To all my American friends, we do have an offshoot at the Old Vic, called Friends of the Old Vic, and it`s a tax write-off, and here`s our Web site.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Call this number, go to this Web site. 

 KEVIN SPACEY: But the truth is, I do spend a lot of time.  There`s a number of different areas in which I am raising money. Obviously, the theater company itself, which is about the producing and coming up with the money to do the actual work. There is also a lot of money that we raise for our educational and our outreach programs, and then on top of that, we`re about to announce at the end of November a capital campaign to raise over 20 million pounds to renovate the entire theater and to bring it up to a 21st century standard. 

A lot of people don`t know, and it`s amazing, and I`m happy that we`re going to do our level best to fix it, but the building has never actually been fully renovated.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So you can get the state to do that.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, I hope to get the state to do that. And I know you had Mr. Brown on yesterday....

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yes, I did.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And he and I are in discussion about it.  He`s been quite supportive. And so what I`m doing is I`m going out and I`m spending a lot of time meeting with individual business leaders, having dinners, and trying to get them on side of why I believe that the arts are worth donating money to, and why it`s important that we continue to produce plays.

CHARLIE ROSE:  "Richard II," tell me about this play.  What commends it to an audience?  You said it`s the story of a king who loses, a king who...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes, he...

CHARLIE ROSE:  There is a debate about monarchy, there is a debate about spin and PR... 

KEVIN SPACEY:  There is a debate about how it is that people go about usurping power. How it is that...

CHARLIE ROSE:  It`s all about power.

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s all about power. And it`s -- but I mean, to a certain degree, my experience of the play, from the journey I`m trying to take with Richard, this is a man who has known nothing else in his life.  I mean, he was crowned at either 9 or at 12, depending on which version you believe, so he`s been a king his entire life and been a king for whom no one ever said, you were wrong, or that`s a bad idea. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  He had no critics. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  He had no critics.  And the truth is, he`s a man who makes a series of bad political decisions, and comes to rue it.  And ultimately it`s a journey about -- I think the play in a sense operates under two spheres. It`s an external journey, an examination of monarchy and pomp and all of that stuff, which even in a modern production we`re still robed and crowned, and all of those accoutrements that still happen today in the House of Lords and houses of parliament.

And then it is about a man who, when stripped of that power, of his reign, is forced to go inside of himself as a man in a way that he never had before in his life. And by the end of the play is a better man and probably would be a better king if he were to be king. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  And then he says it`s too late, though.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, it`s too late with respect to his position, but it`s not too late with respect to his heart and his soul. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  What`s your best soliloquy in this?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, you know, there`s so many extraordinary passages, because this play was written at a time when Shakespeare was writing a great number of sonnets, and so I think that that process of writing the sonnets infused itself into the character of "Richard II," and in a way that it almost doesn`t -- isn`t reflected in any other Shakespeare play.  It`s a beautiful way of speaking, the language, the rhyming couplets.  You could take sections of it out, and they could be their own sonnets.

When he comes back from Ireland, beautiful (INAUDIBLE) one, the abdication scene, where he actually takes his crown off.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And he says?

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s just a heart-wrenching scene of him having to in a sense depose himself. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  What kind of English are you using?

KEVIN SPACEY:  The king`s English, as they would say.  Or as they say...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Or the BBC English, as some would say.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah, they used to be called BBC, and now it`s called RP. And it`s all about -- it`s perceived....

CHARLIE ROSE:  RP is who?

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s just the perceived English.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And I had a great coach.  And I`ve had Trevor, who was always there, you know, whispering "supplant" in my ear. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Rather...

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s interesting, you know, it is in a way like tackling another language, not just Shakespeare itself, and the rhythms of the iambic pentameter, but the language of British -- you know, we have so many words in America, that I don`t say glass, I say glass. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  So do I.

KEVIN SPACEY:  So after 46 years of saying something, you know, it took me quite a while to get it under my belt. And you know, the first week and a half I think of previews --- which is why we had a long preview period -- I just wanted to try to live it for a while, so that that stuff became second nature and I wasn`t thinking about how to say it. 

 CHARLIE ROSE: Is there a difference in the quality of life in London and New York?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Well, you know, you probably feel this, too.  There`s a lot about London that`s like New York in the sense of its energy.  It`s a town that has a lot going on all the time. It obviously doesn`t stay up quite as late, although they are doing their level best to change that. I do enjoy it here, and I think that probably, you know, after living my life in America, mostly in New York, to pick up your life and move to another country, to start a new life, you know, it`s an incredible opportunity, and life has a way of throwing us opportunities we could have never imagined.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You said a famous thing about success, you know, the notion of what you have to do when you find yourself at a certain level of success is do something with it, and you`ve chosen to do -- give that.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah, I know, I -- I suppose when I look back, I`ve had a remarkable run. And I`ve been given so many opportunities, and I feel so blessed to do what I love to do every day and to work with the people that I work with.  You know, I look at the movie career and it`s been remarkable, but movies don`t need my help.  Theater does, and for me to be able to dedicate myself to this, to get up every day and feel as energized and excited and as focused as I am about doing this, this to me is what I was meant to do.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Not act, but do something in addition to acting?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Do something...

CHARLIE ROSE:  To run a theater.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Do something that I hope will last. You know, if I come here and I have a successful time, and two years after I leave the theater closes, I will have failed.  What I want, what I`m doing, every decision I make, every decision our company is making together is about making sure that we build it for a successor...

CHARLIE ROSE:  So that...

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... and toward a theater company that will last long beyond my...

CHARLIE ROSE:  The theater has it own legs. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  The theater has always had its own legs.  It`s been standing there since 1818. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  I know but it was in -- it needed help.

KEVIN SPACEY:  It needed help. And at the time it was built, you know, the only other thing on the South Bank was a mental hospital. We`re glad we had a few more things crop up since then.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Let me talk a little bit about what you`re going to do in addition. The Arthur Miller play.  You got Robert Altman coming over here. This was the last play, and he was working on this when he died, in terms of some rewriting...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE:  "Resurrection Blues."

KEVIN SPACEY:  "Resurrection Blues." They had done a workshop of it about a year ago October in New York. Robert Altman expressed a great interest in doing it.  He sort of came on board to it before -- well, right about the middle of the discussions that we were having as early as last November, and he was working on it.  And then when he passed, we continued the discussions with our New York partner, and Mr. Altman, after a number of phone calls, decided that he wanted...

CHARLIE ROSE:  But Arthur wanted it to come to the Old Vic. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  He did. I was very -- I was very moved to hear that, not just from our producer but from Rebecca Miller, who is...

CHARLIE ROSE:  His daughter.

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... Arthur`s daughter, who I know because we did -- her very first acting role was in a television miniseries that we did together with Jack Lemmon called "The Murder of Mary Phagan." And Rebecca is now an accomplished filmmaker, and married to Daniel Day-Lewis.

CHARLIE ROSE:  I was going to say, there`s your chore, there`s your challenge, to get Daniel Day-Lewis...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Get Daniel, yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE:  (INAUDIBLE) together on the stage. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  So she had indicated that that the Old Vic was always a favorite of Arthur`s, he always hoped that a play of his would go there, so I`m very pleased that it`s going to happen. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  And how many other productions are you going to -- you`re going to do "Moon for the Misbegotten."

KEVIN SPACEY:  I will do that at the opening of our third season, so the slot we`re in now with "Richard" will be "Moon for the Misbegotten" next year. So I won`t begin rehearsals for that until August.  And that reunites me with Howard Davies, who directed "The Iceman Cometh."

CHARLIE ROSE:  And reunites you with O`Neill. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Indeed.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And remembers -- and makes you remember your old friend Jack Lemmon. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Oh, yeah, without question, because many people may not know that "Moon for the Misbegotten" is actually a sequel to "Long Day`s Journey Into Night."  It takes the older alcoholic son Jamie, it takes his story on, because O`Neill had always felt that he hadn`t done his brother justice in "Long Day`s Journey," and he wanted to complete his story.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So he wrote his own story.

KEVIN SPACEY:  This is Jamie Tyrone`s story.

CHARLIE ROSE:  When you -- Shakespeare for you, what does it mean to you?  When the idea of a young guy, who somehow knew he wanted to be an actor very early, who went to Julliard, who started in New York and then got into films, and did all those 40 films you`ve done, including an Oscar for "American Beauty" and all of that stuff, was it always a part of your dream not just to do the theater thing, but to have an opportunity to come back to Shakespeare?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes, you know, I studied Shakespeare in school, I did it in high school, I did a lot of festivals.  My first professional job was in "Henry IV, part I" in Central Park, in which I played the messenger. Thank you. I had six lines. And I`ve always...

CHARLIE ROSE:  And (INAUDIBLE) be very good at every one of them. 

(CROSSTALK)

KEVIN SPACEY:  I was a lot of characters in that play. I was part of the ensemble.

I`ve always wanted to tackle the great Shakespearean parts, and I suppose, like I`ve said, it`s a little bit like being an athlete. I don`t think I was ready to do it until now, and I was a little bit relieved when I discovered in some of my research that Laurence Olivier was 31 when he came to the Old Vic in 1937, 1947.  Might have been `47, to do his first season of Shakespeare, really. He was 31. So I thought, well, 46 is not bad. It`s, you know, a little bit more...

CHARLIE ROSE:  You can work your way towards "Othello."

KEVIN SPACEY:  I would love to work -- well, I`m not sure if "Othello" is a part I should play, but Iago is a pretty good part, and you know, maybe someday "Richard III" and "Coriolanus." There`s some extraordinary parts, but a lot of it will have to do with the director and the time.  And you know, when you`re trying to map out a season, what is the right thing to do at the right time? And also to be able to continue to carve out a little bit of film work, because the other part of my day I didn`t get to, in addition to being an actor, is I still run Trigger Street, my film company, in America, and we`re producing an enormous amount of...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Aren`t you doing some reality television in which you`re kind of a mentor to young actors?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah. What it is, is that the Learning Channel has done a thing on interns, and they have assigned three different interns to three different companies.  One is working for Robert Evans. One is working for Method Man, and one is working for Trigger Street.  And so I`m interviewed a couple of times. It`s not a reality show.

(CROSSTALK)

KEVIN SPACEY:  They don`t follow me around on camera, although I did come to...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Now, are you going to select them, or are you going to do -- based on performances, or something?

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s essentially a show about these three interns and how they do, but it`s not a contest.  It`s not that kind of a reality show. It`s more of an exploration about what it`s like and what it takes to come and work at a major company.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You`ll do one movie a year?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Maybe two.  You know, it depends. And I mean, look, the truth is, is even when I wasn`t doing theater, you`d be lucky if you found one or two movies a year that were worth doing.  So I am just going to stay on that track.

CHARLIE ROSE:  "Usual Suspects" is not a movie that`s about to happen.

KEVIN SPACEY:  You know, it was a great rumor.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Started by you.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Started by me, apparently.  And I was speaking to a waitress in a coffee shop, and I told her...

CHARLIE ROSE:  You were drunk with coffee or something.

KEVIN SPACEY:  ...we`re going to do a sequel to "The Usual Suspects."

CHARLIE ROSE:  Did you actually say that to her?

KEVIN SPACEY:  I didn`t say anything.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You said nothing.

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, this is just a made-up story, so we did....

CHARLIE ROSE:  So you -- the words we`re going to do a sequel to "Usual Suspects," same director and me...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Never would have come out of my mouth.  I wouldn`t have considered...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Why isn`t that a great idea?

KEVIN SPACEY:  I think it`s a terrible idea.

 CHARLIE ROSE: Why?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Because it`s a terrible idea.

 CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me -- who is your wish list to come to, in terms of either plays or actors, male or female, to come to...

KEVIN SPACEY:  The Old Vic?

CHARLIE ROSE:  The Old Vic.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Judi Dench.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Oh, man.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Jeremy Irons.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Here`s what I want you to do for me.  The single most loving television show I did in the last year probably was Maggie Smith and Judi Dench together.  It`s unbelievable.  Can we put them together in a play?

KEVIN SPACEY:  We`d love to put them together.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Do we have a play that would fit?

KEVIN SPACEY:  We`re doing "The Usual Suspects," and it`s a good play, I think, and strange casting. Because she`s going to play Fenster.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You don`t want to hear what I say, do you?

 KEVIN SPACEY: Not at all. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  I may have ideas.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes.  You want to come on our board? 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yes!

KEVIN SPACEY:  You got to give some money first.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yes, I`ll raise money for you.  No, you know who should be on your board? Your very good friend, the former president.

KEVIN SPACEY:  The former president.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Bill Clinton should be on the board.  He knows how to raise money. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Former president. Former president has been very supportive...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Of the Old Vic?

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... of the Old Vic, yeah, and... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  You got him raising money for you, too? I can see it now.  I can see it now.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Come on down to Old Vic!

 CHARLIE ROSE: Give this dollar to my library and give this dollar to my pal Kevin at the Old Vic.

KEVIN SPACEY:  That`s a good idea. I`m going to get on the phone right after and give him a call.

I`d love to see -- anyway, I would love to see Judi, I would love to see Maggie, I`d love to get Peter O`Toole back up.  And you know, O`Toole has been so incredibly supportive.  He`s come to every one of our shows.  He sits in the front row, in the student seats.

CHARLIE ROSE:  So he can hear or what? What`s the reason?

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, he just likes sitting...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Oh, you let him sit in the student seats?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes, yes. I like being under 25.

CHARLIE ROSE:  I knew you`d do one impression. (INAUDIBLE). So who else?

KEVIN SPACEY:  I mean, there`s also great writers.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Any -- I mean, are you seriously talking to my friend Malkovich about doing something?

KEVIN SPACEY:  Malkovich has been in discussion. I would love to get Edward Norton here.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Are these serious discussions, or you call them up and say, I`m at the Old Vic, you have any good ideas, let me know? It`s not a discussion, that`s just, you know...

KEVIN SPACEY:  These are serious discussions, in the sense that I`ve asked people, think about what play you might want to do.  I`ll come to you with a play if I think of one. So there is a lot of back and forth, and you know, a lot of it has to do with people`s schedules, but I would love to have a lot of people come.

CHARLIE ROSE:  OK, how about some American playwrights, how about some Tennessee Williams, can we do that?

KEVIN SPACEY:  We can.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Can we do some Sam Shepard here?

KEVIN SPACEY:  We can. We can do some Mamet.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You don`t need me, do you?  Mamet?  You can do Mamet, yeah.

KEVIN SPACEY:  You can do...

CHARLIE ROSE:  You can do "Glengarry Glen Ross," except it`s just been done.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah, but when we`re going to do it, we`re going to change the title.

CHARLIE ROSE:  To what?

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s going to be called "Genberry Glen Close (ph)."

CHARLIE ROSE:  That will be good.

(CROSSTALK)

CHARLIE ROSE:  It might work.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Now, I also -- we have a -- we have a program called Old Vic New Voices, in which we encourage new writing. So we`ve gone over to New York and introduced five or six British playwrights over there, and then we`ve brought five or six American playwrights over here, and we do these stage readings.  So we`re beginning to try to build I hope a stronger cultural bridge between the United States -- and I know for a fact that I will travel with "Moon for the Misbegotten" and come to Broadway with it, as we did on the last tour.  Because I want to begin to, as I say, bring the Old Vic brand beyond the borders... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Who`s going to be in "Moon for the Misbegotten," other than you?

KEVIN SPACEY:  We don`t know yet.

CHARLIE ROSE:  All right.  Your ambition knows no bounds, does it?

KEVIN SPACEY:  To -- to do -- yes, to do what I`m doing, does not...

CHARLIE ROSE:  No, I mean, you don`t... 

KEVIN SPACEY:  But I`m having a blast.

CHARLIE ROSE:  My sense is that you have pretty much set out, first of all, to be an actor, from an early age.  You went to Julliard. Then, you know, you`ve set out to know how to communicate and how to be entertaining on television.  You`ve had 40 films and two Oscars, right? Now you`ve got the theater.  I mean, how many actors would dream of being artistic director at the Old Vic, or any other place -- I can`t think of anywhere better than the Old Vic, I mean, history and everything else.  You -- there`s nothing you don`t think you can do?

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, that`s not true.  There are many things I don`t think I can do.

 CHARLIE ROSE: In the theater? 

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, that`s not true, because there are many times when I`ll read a play or someone will suggest something and I think, great, but not for me.

And even if I think it`s great, you know, and this is certainly true in film, where I may have said no to a movie and someone else did it, and it turned out to be a really good film, I`m very delighted, but I felt my presence would somehow be the wrong thing or imbalance it in some way. 

I am certainly without question, and sometimes I get accused of arrogance, that if I set out to do something that I believe in, I`m passionate about, I`m dedicated to, I`m focused on, that somehow that gets turned into arrogance and you know...

CHARLIE ROSE:  No, I said ambition, I didn`t...

KEVIN SPACEY:  But I -- if I believe I`m challenged by something, if I don`t think something is going to come easy to me, then I love setting out to try to accomplish it.  Because I`m still learning, you know.  I`m still growing.  I`m still...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Even as an actor?

KEVIN SPACEY:  I can`t tell you what it was like every day in rehearsal with Trevor Nunn.  It was like going to a Shakespeare master class.  And what I`ve learned about the role, about the play, about myself as an actor, about my weaknesses, through these first three weeks of previous, where the performance has gone from the first night we did it to last night, is a remarkable journey.  And where we`ll be in five weeks is a remarkable journey.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Things you have learned about -- not just about acting...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE:  About acting.

 KEVIN SPACEY: Yeah.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Can you just give me one example of what Kevin Spacey had to learn about acting? 

KEVIN SPACEY:  I learned in the last two weeks that I don`t have to try so hard. I think that I -- you know, my first Shakespearean role, you know, a certain amount of pressure about, will I be able to do it, will I sound like a British king, will I work within a company of 24 quite frankly much more accomplished Shakespearean actors than myself.  And we have a broad range, you know.  We`ve got Julian Glover, who`s in his `70s, all the way to somebody who got out of RADA a couple of weeks ago.

But they have grown up with it; I haven`t. They have been incredibly supportive.  And night to night, I`ve learned as we`ve gone through -- you know, I got a letter from somebody, actually, who took me to task. It was kind of lovely. And I brought it in and I read it to Trevor one day. It just took me to task for how can you -- how can you yell through your speeches, and the truth is that probably in the first four or five or six performances, I was just beginning to gauge where I had to go, where it needed to go.  I didn`t need to fill the house in a way that I was feeling an obligation to do so.  I could pull back, I could allow the internal, quieter moments to actually happen and trust them. 

And that`s about learning. That`s about learning night to night. 

 Theater is not frozen.  I mean, that`s why reviews -- they are about one performance, one night.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And one prism.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And one prism.

CHARLIE ROSE:  A person sees it through one set of experiences.

KEVIN SPACEY:  From where they`re sitting (ph).  And theater is alive. It is different night to night for everyone. You`re performing in front of 1,000 different people.  You are growing, you are changing, you are trying new things.  And it is all about those subtleties and how they affect a performance that I think, you know, a work can begin in one place and end in another. And it`s like if you -- you know, I often make this analogy, but I think it`s the right one. If you play tennis, you know, if you play any kind of sport, you go out there, you know, yeah, it`s the same game, and you`ve got the same rules.  But every night you work -- every time you go out, you`re working on a different part of your game, and it`s always a different game, and it`s always thrilling to do.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And just as Tiger Woods, one example, or Roger Feeder, two people playing the game like no one has ever played it before, both of them go to the practice court, or to the practice grounds at a golf course, because they believe they can improve it and take it to another level.

KEVIN SPACEY:  That`s absolutely true.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You know, I mean, that`s why I -- I have a great amount of admiration for you, because I know how hard a worker you are.  You have to go to the theater, I know...

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes.

CHARLIE ROSE:  ... to do this. Thank you for doing this. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Oh, thank you.  I`m delighted... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  It`s a pleasure to have you.

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... to have you over here.  It`s a little odd not being in a black room with the roundtable.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Yes, I know.

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s a little bit...

CHARLIE ROSE:  A bit colorful, isn`t it?

KEVIN SPACEY:  It`s a bit, it`s a bit, you know -- quite frankly, Charlie, you`ve gone a little bit more -- what`s the word I`m searching for?  A little bit more deco than I`ve ever seen you before.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Is it becoming?

KEVIN SPACEY:  (INAUDIBLE) I don`t know.

CHARLIE ROSE:  And Grouch, too. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Thank you very much.  You got two of them.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Kevin Spacey, thank you. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Thank you. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  "Richard II" at the Old Vic will be at the Old Vic in this production until November something.

KEVIN SPACEY:  November 26th. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  It`s probably sold out, but still try. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, no.

CHARLIE ROSE:  No, it`s not sold out.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Call.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Call.

KEVIN SPACEY:  And even if you can`t get tickets for "Richard," "Resurrection Blues" is coming up.  You know, we`re doing this other thing which I think you might find interesting. We are creating the first piece of theater to come out of Iraq. 

CHARLIE ROSE:  Oh, I wanted to ask you about that.

KEVIN SPACEY:  The war.  It`s going to be an adaptation of Stravinsky`s "A Soldier`s Tale," using Iraqi actors, Iraqi musicians, British actors and British musicians in both... 

CHARLIE ROSE:  And Iraqis...

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... Both languages.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Based on an Iraqi poet?

KEVIN SPACEY:  No, Stravinsky.

CHARLIE ROSE:  Stravinsky.

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yeah, "Soldier`s Tale." So it`s being adopted to be a modern piece, and it`s quite extraordinary. So that`s coming over for 11 performances in February.

CHARLIE ROSE:  You`re a politically active guy, I mean in a sense you care about politics, you care about your country...

KEVIN SPACEY:  I read the papers, I am fascinated by...

CHARLIE ROSE:  Exactly.

KEVIN SPACEY:  ... as you pointed out, the quote in the headline today.

CHARLIE ROSE:  There`s a quote in the papers here, "The Independent," specifically saying that President Bush had said to the Palestinians at some point, you know, that part of the reason... 

KEVIN SPACEY:  He went to war was because God told him to.

CHARLIE ROSE:  God told him to. 

KEVIN SPACEY:  Yes.

 CHARLIE ROSE: Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic. Back in a moment.  Stay with us.