Oscar winner Kevin Spacey, who has faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct in the past six years, received a standing ovation at the University of Oxford, where he, at one point, had been a visiting lecturer.
This event was centered around a lecture on cancel culture. It was the first time Spacey had spoken on stage since he was found not guilty of sexual assault in July.
Spacey performed a five-minute scene from Timon of Athens, a play written by William Shakespeare, at the event held at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theater.
The session was moderated by the New York Post columnist, Douglas Murray, in honor of the late conservative British philosopher Roger Scruton.
Murray invited Spacey to speak at the lecture.
Months prior to his death in 2020, Scruton was fired as a U.K. government adviser after a controversial interview he gave with the left-leaning New Statesman magazine in 2019.
During this interview, Scruton made comments on how the Chinese government had been turning its people into “robots” and how Islamophobia was “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The New Statesmen magazine soon apologized to Scruton and he was given back his role as a government adviser.
Murray told The Times that the event is “about what happens when a society drops a person for no reason.”
“Something that has been on Kevin’s mind, as it was on Roger Scruton’s mind, so I said I want him to be back on stage in the U.K.,” he added.
Spacey’s performance of this scene was done after London’s Prince Charles Cinema reversed its offer to host the premiere of Spacey’s new Welsh film, Control, in which he only had a voice role.
Spacey’s lawyer, Chase Scolnick, said in a statement, “The Prince Charles Cinema’s decision to censor Kevin’s latest project is beyond disappointing. [It] rejects the legal process of two countries, ignores the overwhelming evidence of Kevin’s innocence, and disregards the hard work and sacrifice of dozens of impartial jurors who found Kevin 100% innocent.”
