Succession star Brian Cox has defended actor Kevin Spacey, and condemned the idea of public figures being ‘cancelled’.
Since 2017, Spacey has been accused by more than 30 men of sexual misconduct of varying degrees. He has denied the accusations and was found not liable in a 2022 lawsuit in New York, as well as being acquitted during a separate case in London in 2023. Between 2018 and 2019, charges against him were dropped or not filed.
As a result of the negative publicity from these allegations, Netflix moved forward with the TV show House Of Cards’ final season without him as the star. Spacey was also replaced by Christopher Plummer in the 2017 film All The Money In The World, while his planned biopic of writer Gore Vidal was shelved.
Cox, whose stellar career went to a new high with the HBO drama Succession, said in an interview with The i Paper that he felt the actor being ostracised from Hollywood, or ‘cancelled’, is something that irks him. “Kevin is an old friend of mine,” says Cox. “All right, Kevin did certain things… He also did a lot of extraordinary work. And I find that really petty, and I just don’t like it. It’s sneaky and petty and not right”.
He went on to describe his own experiences with the actor. “Not everybody is abusive. I’ve never found Kevin Spacey abusive” he said. “He was misguided, certainly, in terms of his sexuality, but that’s to do with him coming to terms with his own sexuality and how he’s dealt with that, and the dilemma that it’s caused in his life”
“We’ve got to an age now,” he continued, “where people are going, ‘Oh, that’s bad, he’s out, boom, he’s cancelled.’ What do you mean ‘cancelled’? How dare you cancel anybody?”
These latest comments come after Cox said in an interview in December that Spacey should “be given the opportunity to come back to work”.
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