Spacey Unmasked, review: a sober, unsensational and relentless spool of allegations

Kevin Spacey speaks outside Southwark Crown Court, after he was found not guilty on charges related to allegations of sexual offences, in London, 2023. – Susannah Ireland/Reuters

Several days before Spacey Unmasked (Channel 4) was broadcast, Kevin Spacey posted his own review of Channel 4’s two-part investigative documentary on X (formerly Twitter).

“I will not sit back and be attacked by a dying network’s one-sided ‘documentary’ about me in their desperate attempt for ratings,” he said. “There’s a proper channel to handle allegations against me and it’s not Channel 4.”

It doesn’t sound like he watched it. Perhaps that’s understandable, given that Spacey Unmasked is a relentless spool of allegations from men saying how Spacey was (among other things) “the devil”. But whatever the merits of the allegations made, there was nothing desperate about Katherine Haywood’s two films.

Spacey Unmasked certainly doesn’t feel like a sensationalist witch hunt: it is stressed from the outset that in a British court last year Spacey was found not guilty of all charges of sexual assaults against four men between 2001 and 2013. None of the men speaking here were involved in those trials. It also reports a civil trial verdict in America, one that found that Spacey did not sexually abuse Anthony Rapp, then 14, while both were relatively unknown actors in Broadway plays in 1980s.

In addition, the documentary tries to interweave stories from Spacey’s childhood to at least grant some kind of understanding as to why he might have grown up to be brilliant, shape-shifting, magnetic, predatory. (Spacey’s father, his estranged brother Randy claims, was a violent abuser; unfortunately Randy, a Rod Stewart impersonator with a Liberace dress sense, does not come across as the most reliable witness.)

Spacey, we know, was offered a right to reply by Channel 4 (though his fulminations on X show he felt he wasn’t given enough time). The actor has since had his own say in a long interview with the former GB News presenter Dan Wootton, in which he again denies all of the allegations. On X, he has described Phillips’s work as a “crocumentary”.

Really though, the programme attempts to establish that there was a pattern to Spacey’s behaviour throughout his life, one that he has repeatedly denied and has not been proven in court. A large part of Spacey Unmasked is given over to the complainants. If this documentary is indeed one-sided, it falls on their side.

Both episodes of ‘Spacey Unmasked’ are on Channel4.com now

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