Director Bryan Singer, the latest powerful Hollywood man to face public accusations of sexual abuse and misconduct, has told an interviewer that he would be open to working with disgraced actor Kevin Spacey again, but that it “depends on the project.”
Singer, who worked with Spacey on The Usual Suspects and later on Superman Returns, was approached by a reporter from gossip blog TMZ and asked whether he’d be willing to do another film with his former collaborator. After a long pause, he replied:
“These are loaded questions, people want to hear one answer or the other … he’s a guy, I helped launch his career, he’s an acquaintance of mine and, y’know, it depends on the project I guess …”
The director also denied a claim by Usual Suspects actor Gabriel Byrne that production on the 1995 film was shut down as a result of Spacey’s predatory behaviour. He claimed to baffled by Byrne’s accusations, saying that they are “not true at all.”
Singer was recently fired from the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which he had been directing, but was evasive on the reasons he was let go, saying “I don’t know if the story’s over yet” but denying claims that he had fought with lead actor Rami Malek.
The TMZ interview appears to have been shot before news broke about the filing of a recent lawsuit against Singer, in which the plaintiff Cesar Sanchez-Guzman accused the director of raping him at a party on a yacht in 2003, when he was aged 17.
In a statement via his lawyers, Singer categorically denied the claims against him, and implied that Sanchez-Guzman’s lawsuit is financially motivated. Singer has faced accusations of sexual assault in the past, but two suits against him were withdrawn in 2014.
Kevin Spacey was fired from House Of Cards after actor Anthony Rapp accused him of making sexual advances towards him at the age of 14, after which numerous other men came forward with similar stories about the actor.
