Kevin Spacey compares fall from grace to Hollywood blacklist at Cannes

Kevin Spacey seems to be making a soft relaunch into mainstream media with a Cannes comeback.

On Tuesday night, the actor was the guest of honor at the Better World Fund’s gala dinner during the Cannes Film Festival, where he received a lifetime achievement award for “excellence in film and television.”

According to the AFP, before the event, Spacey, 65, told journalists, “I feel surrounded by so much affection and love. I’ve heard from so many of my friends and colleagues and co-stars in the last week since this award was announced.”

“It’s very nice to be back,” he added. “I’m glad to be working, I’ll tell you that.”

Spacey has not been seen at Cannes since 2016, when he served as emcee for the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) gala, a consequence of the festival’s no-tolerance policy on sexual misconduct amid #MeToo’s rise.

The House of Cards star has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen men since 2017. He was found not guilty in a 2023 case in London in which four men alleged he sexually assaulted them between 2001 and 2013, and before that, he was found not liable in a 2022 civil lawsuit brought by actor Anthony Rapp, who accused Spacey of molesting him in 1986 when he was 14, and Spacey was 26. Spacey came out as gay amid the original 2017 accusation by Rapp.

While Spacey has quietly returned to acting, the Oscar winner hasn’t been invited back to any major Hollywood productions, which he referenced several times throughout Tuesday night’s acceptance speech, according to multiple media reports.

“I’d like to congratulate [Better World Fund founder] Manuel [Collas de La Roche] for the decision to invite me here tonight to accept this award,” Spacey told his audience. “Who would have ever thought that honoring someone who has been exonerated in every courtroom he’s ever walked into would be thought of as a brave idea. But here we are.”

Spacey compared himself to Dalton Trumbo, an award-winning screenwriter who was blacklisted in the McCarthy Communist scare from 1947 to 1960.

“It was a long, long time ago, but we have to think about the pushback that [Kirk Douglas] received after he made the brave decision to stand up for fellow colleague, two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo,” Spacey said. “He couldn’t find work in Hollywood for 13 years… There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I’ve learned a lot from history — it often repeats itself. The blacklist was a terrible time in our history so that it never happens again.”

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Douglas, one of the leading stars of Hollywood’s golden age, hired Trumbo (and gave him an official credit) to write the 1960 epic Spartacus, which Douglas executive-produced and starred in.

“It was such a terrible, shameful time,” Douglas told PEOPLE in 2015 about the purge of alleged Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry during the ’40s and ’50s. “Dalton was in prison because he refused to answer questions, so I decided, the hell with it! I’m going to put his name on it. I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of because it broke the blacklist.”

Spacey closed his speech by thanking his manager, Evan Lowenstein, and giving a nod to his “friend” Elton John. “I’m still standing,” he said, before he walked from the stage to sit down.