Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | Celebrity | February 20, 2025
Like running into an old flame you’d rather forget, this week saw the unwelcome return of Kevin Spacey to our newsfeeds. To recap: Guy Pearce, Spacey’s co-star in the 1997 film L.A. Confidential, was interviewed on Scott Feinberg’s “Awards Chatter” podcast, where he opened up about feeling intimidated and targeted by Spacey’s unwanted advances on set, feelings he brushed off until allegations of sexual assault against Spacey surfaced decades later. Spacey responded with a video on X, where he called for Pearce to “grow up.”
I’m not here to talk about that, because the news cycle has already churned what it can from this story. In fact, there are far more headlines covering Spacey’s response than Pearce’s original recollections. For a man who has supposedly been cancelled, media outlets sure are eager to collect the clicks they can from his childish social media proclamations rather than dig into the more interesting story of how easy it is to rationalize uncomfortable behavior or surprising it can be to recognize the bullets we’ve dodged in retrospect (I say that as someone who interned at Miramax during the Weinstein years). One goal I’m setting for the cursed year of 2025 is to stop feeding the cycle with news that doesn’t need retelling. If we want someone like Spacey to disappear, we can’t keep shining a spotlight on him every time he decides to complain. Or if we do have to talk about him, at least let him be the butt of the joke.
Which is why I’d much rather talk about a completely separate incident: Fred Armisen’s excellent Kevin Spacey joke from the Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special. During the Q&A portion with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Armisen stood up and asked why Lorne Michaels had cut a sketch he’d written called “Vampire Office” back in 2005. After some back and forth, he decides to resubmit the script, with the punchline “Great. Next time Spacey hosts!” Then he holds his hand up, looking for anyone in the celebrity-stuffed audience to high five him. The moment lingers awkwardly for laughs as no one takes the bait, for obvious reasons. I didn’t think much about it when it aired - it was a throw-away gag in a three-hour show, after all - but I keep coming back to it when I see the coverage of Spacey’s response to Pearce. What SNL got right is that Spacey is already dunzo.
There’s a stage of Hollywood scandal where the industry stays mum, sitting back to see how bad the damage is going to be. After all, many Hollywood players can return from scandal and be coworkers and moneymakers again. You don’t want to burn a bridge too soon. When SNL had frequent host Alec Baldwin introduce the fake commercials montage during the special, I likewise took it as a sign that his dismissed manslaughter charge from the Rust shooting is firmly behind him.
Still, in a roomful of not just comedians but true Hollywood legends - De Niro, Nicholson, Spielberg - SNL joked that Kevin Spacey would never be on the show again (and later implied as much about Kanye and Sean Combs). I’m not saying Saturday Night Live is a spotless moral arbiter. The show admitted as much itself, with a highlight reel featuring their history of problematic racist and sexist humor and John Mulaney joking about the two murderers who have hosted in the past. But when the largest, most influential network comedy platform in the country decides to take a moment during its biggest, most star-studded night to joke that you’re never coming back? Yeah, that’s a pretty clear nail in your coffin.
Gee, I wonder why Kevin Spacey didn’t hop on X to tell SNL to grow up?
