Audience Lauds Spacey's 'Cancel Culture' Lecture

Actor gets standing ovation during Oxford speech that included short Shakespeare performance
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 17, 2023 11:33 AM CDT

While one UK theater recently snubbed Kevin Spacey, canceling the world premiere of his latest film, another audience across the pond just gave the actor a standing ovation. Spacey, acquitted this summer by a London jury of sexual assault, delivered a lecture on Monday at the University of Oxford, in "what is thought to be his first stage appearance" since his acquittal, per Deadline. Conservative free-speech proponent Douglas Murray introduced Spacey by advising how the works of Shakespeare can inform us about the phenomenon of "cancel culture"—specifically via the bard's play Timon of Athens, which Murray told the Times of London was about what "happens when a society drops a person for no reason," per the Guardian.

"Timon has the whole world before him," Murray said. "He's surrounded by friends and admirers. He's been generous to all. Yet he falls on hard times ... and when he does absolutely everyone deserts him." That's when Spacey took the stage and delivered a five-minute scene from Shakespeare's 17th-century satire, about "a rich citizen of the Greek city who lavishes all his wealth on parasitic writers and artists," per the Independent. "When he loses his wealth, his former friends abandon him." The paper notes that the short snippet, which the 64-year-old actor read off of cue cards, was "seemingly performed by Spacey as a way to discuss his own exile from Hollywood."

Whatever Spacey's motives, the audience responded enthusiastically with applause that lasted for upward of 40 seconds, per Deadline. One spectator deemed Spacey's delivery a "phenomenal performance." The Oxford lecture was given in memory of Sir Roger Scruton, a deceased conservative philosopher who was fired in 2019 from his role as a UK housing adviser after being accused of making racist remarks in the New Statesman. He was reappointed a few months later after the magazine said Scruton's views had been misrepresented. (More Kevin Spacey stories.)

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