Three and a half years after Anthony Rapp accused Kevin Spacey of trying to seduce him when Rapp was 14 years old and Spacey was 26, the disgraced actor is returning to the screen, ABC News reports. Italian actor Franco Nero, best known in the United States for starring in the 1966 spaghetti western Django and playing one of the villains in Die Hard 2, has cast Spacey in a small role in L’uomo che Disegnò Dio (The Man Who Drew God), written by Lorenzo De Luca and Eugenio Masciari. Nero’s wife, actress Vanessa Redgrave, will also appear in the film, joining a cast that includes former Bond villain Robert Davi and a passel of Italian actors. According to Variety, Spacey will play a police detective.
Spacey declined to comment on his return to the screen, but Nero was not so reticent, telling ABC News, “I’m very happy that Kevin Spacey agreed to participate in my film. I consider him a great actor and I can’t wait to start the movie.”
After Harvey Weinstein, Spacey had one of the quickest and most dramatic falls from grace of any Hollywood player accused of sexual misconduct. Rapp’s initial allegations were promptly followed by a flood of other accusations (at least 20 stemming from Spacey’s tenure at the Old Vic), Spacey’s removal from his flagship Netflix show House of Cards, and his digital replacement with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World. Spacey said he didn’t remember the incident with Rapp, but apologized to him for what he characterized as “deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.” The actor denied the other accusations, but went on to face criminal prosecution in Massachusetts for an alleged groping incident (charges were dropped amid allegations his accuser had tampered with evidence), police investigations of several alleged incidents in Los Angeles (the DA declined to prosecute one case because of the statute of limitations; another lawsuit was dropped after the death of one of his accusers), and a Scotland Yard investigation into Spacey’s behavior at the Old Vic (reportedly still ongoing). The actor has stayed out of the public eye since his career imploded, with the exception of the bizarre videos he’s released every Christmas Eve for the last three years.
According to the IMDb, L’uomo che Disegnò Dio is about “the rise and fall of a blind artist who has the extraordinary gift of making true-to-life portraits just by listening to human voices.”
