Can Kevin Spacey’s celebrity mates help un-cancel him?

As the two-time Academy Award-winning actor’s peers, including Stephen Fry and Sharon Stone, write letters of support for the disgraced ‘Usual Suspects’ star, Nick Hilton asks: is it possible to come back from cancellation?

Kevin Spacey has spent the past seven years in a form of professional purgatory following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct (Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

There are many signs that your career as an actor is on the rocks. You stop getting auditions, perhaps, or invites to swanky after-show parties. Maybe people keep gawping at you in public but don’t ask for selfies any more, because they don’t necessarily want to be seen in a photograph with you. And then there’s the final indignity: when a ragtag group of your peers write letters of support to the Telegraph, asking for you to be given something to do with your life.

That was the fate this week of Kevin Spacey, the two-time Academy Award-winning actor who has spent the past seven years in a form of professional purgatory, following a series of allegations of sexual misconduct. The actor who, in 2017, had been about to star as J Paul Getty in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, suddenly found himself without a friend in the industry. But the week after a series of fresh allegations – which the actor has denounced, saying he “will not take responsibility or apologise to anyone who’s made up stuff about me or exaggerated stories about me” – were made in the Channel 4 two-parter Spacey Unmasked, it seems his banishment is ending.

“To continue to harass and hound him, to devote a whole documentary to accusations that simply do not add up to crimes,” wrote Stephen Fry. “How can that be considered proportionate and justified?” It was a sentiment echoed by others. “I can’t wait to see Kevin back at work,” said Sharon Stone. “Personally speaking,” wrote Liam Neeson, “our industry needs him and misses him greatly.” It is notable, possibly, that none of these actors have ever actually starred alongside Spacey.