Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey empathises with those left out of work due to the coronavirus pandemic after having his world "suddenly stop" amid sexual misconduct allegations in late 2017.
The American Beauty star's career and legacy was left in tatters in October, 2017, when actor Anthony Rapp, 48, accused Spacey, 60, of making sexual advances towards him when he was an underage teen.
The news led to a string of other alleged victims coming forward with their own claims about Spacey's inappropriate behaviour, which cost him his job on hit political drama series House of Cards and led to him being edited out of Ridley Scott's movie All the Money in the World.
Spacey has been laying low ever since, only reappearing in two odd viral Christmas videos, but he recently resurfaced to reflect on how his experience of suddenly finding himself out of work compares to people whose livelihoods have been threatened by the COVID-19 outbreak, which has led to various industry shutdowns worldwide.
In an interview for the Bits & Pretzels podcast, he said, "I can relate to what it feels like to have your world suddenly stop."
"I don't think it will come as a surprise for anyone that my world completely changed in the fall of 2017. My job, my relationships and my standing in my own industry were gone in just a matter of hours," Spacey shared, according to the Daily Mail.
"And so while we may have found ourselves in similar situations albeit for very different reasons, I still feel that some of the emotional struggles are very much the same. And so I do have empathy for what it feels like to suddenly be told that you can't go back to work, or that you might lose your job, and it's a situation you have absolutely no control over."
The once-acclaimed actor then admitted he felt lost when the #MeToo movement turned his life upside down, likening the pursuit of his career dreams to driving a car.
"I was so busy defining myself by what I did or what I was trying to do that when it stopped, I had no idea what to do next, because all I ever knew was how to act," Spacey continued.
"When my career came to a grinding, screeching halt, when I was faced with the uncertainty that I might never be hired as an actor again, I had asked myself a question I'd never asked myself before, which is, 'If I can't act, who am I?'"
Spacey, who has denied any wrongdoing, is still currently facing six allegations of sexual assault in the U.K., relating to alleged incidents between 1996 and 2013, while a criminal complaint in Massachusetts was dropped last year (19) after his accuser declined to testify at a pre-trial hearing.
Another sexual assault investigation in Los Angeles was also recently abandoned following the death of the alleged victim, an unidentified male massage therapist, who had accused Spacey of misconduct during an incident at a private residence in Malibu, California in 2016.
