Don’t call it a comeback — yet — but last week, speaking with Bill Maher on an episode of the latter’s “Club Random” podcast, Kevin Spacey said that he felt “much more welcomed” in Hollywood of late. It was an optimistic assessment coming from a former Oscar winner whose name has become synonymous with serious allegations and smirking denials — including a bizarre set of YouTube videos in which Spacey defended himself in character as the villainous Frank Underwood from “House of Cards.”
Spacey has never been convicted of a crime — he was acquitted by a jury in July 2023 of nine criminal sexual assault charges and in May 2026 settled civil claims with three men out of court. But that hasn’t done much for his reputation in the court of public opinion. “There’s too much spoke for there to be no fire,” Maher said.
“It was a small kitchen fire that could have been put out with an extinguisher,” Spacey replied evenly, as if channelling his sociopathic signature roles.
As usual, the host was blowing smoke, not to mention helping to make Spacey feel welcome in the first place by inviting him to chat.
Maher’s true gift is self-aggrandizement, which some mistake for fearless truth-telling. Given his own history of foot-in-mouth disease, Maher’s apparent sympathy for the proverbial devils is unsurprising. A big plank of his anti-woke shtick is platforming disgraced public figures, including Roseanne Barr and Louis C.K. In 2017, accusations of sexual misconduct against C.K. came to light, which he himself subsequently confirmed. He showed up at the Kennedy Center on Sunday to honour Maher, who was receiving the prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a dubious choice that nevertheless resonated in light of Maher’s ongoing feud with Donald Trump.
The timing of C.K.’s cameo was surely interesting, as it coincided with this week’s release of his first Netflix special in nearly a decade. “Ridiculous” was shot last fall during its creator’s well-attended — and well-reviewed — standup tour. Writing in The New Yorker, Tyler Foggat observed that the Emmy-winning comedian “isn’t too cancelled to perform several sold-out shows at the Beacon (Theater), but he’s cancelled enough that, if you manage to snag a ticket, you might not want to brag about it to your co-workers.”
It’s a good line, but it misses a deeper point. For a certain kind of viewer — or a professional contrarian like Maher — supporting entertainers on the other side of their scandals constitutes a form of bragging rights.
Exhibit A: noted cinephile Elon Musk, who uploaded Armie Hammer’s comeback vehicle “Citizen Vigilante” — about an American army officer doling out extrajudicial retribution in an unnamed European city — to his X account for 48 hours. Musk was impressed with the film’s viciously xenophobic thrust, including several gratuitously violent sequences depicting the murder of Muslim immigrants. The upshot of his gesture was that a film effectively banned in Germany for its extreme content has become a social media conversation piece.
“Citizen Vigilante” was directed by Uwe Boll, the German-born provocateur for whom the word “iconoclast” is an understatement. Critic Nathan Rabin, who co-authored a monograph on Boll’s maligned 2007 action-comedy “Postal,” recently opined on Substack that the new effort is “the most racist film since ‘Birth of a Nation.’”
On the evidence of the clips currently circulating on social media — amplified by right-wing influencers in thrall to its not-so-submerged call to arms — that assessment seems correct. (Another take, from Variety: “a violent, incoherent, morally bankrupt slice of exploitation.”)
This rage-baiting is par for the course for Boll. What’s unsettling is trying to square “Citizen Vigilante”’s dog whistles with its star’s emotional recollection of his casting. “I’m pretty sure I cried,” Hammer told The Hollywood Reporter in a feature apparently commissioned to help rehabilitate his image after he was accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend and abusive behaviour by other women (he has denied the allegations, and was never charged with a crime). “It was just this moment where I was like: I’m going to get to do the thing that I love more than anything — other than my children.”
It’s probably worth taking Hammer’s self-presentation as a dutiful dad in good faith, even as it also smacks of damage control. Back in 2024, the actor showed up — where else? — on “Club Random” to talk about the paradoxical “liberation” of being blacklisted, leveraging shame against self-actualization. He framed his exile as providing a much-needed dose of perspective. Obviously, though Hammer wants back into the industry — enough that he’s willing to become a poster boy for the white-supremacist set.
One of Hammer’s last movies before his cancellation was “Sorry to Bother You,” a piece of radical pop-agitprop by the anti-capitalist filmmaker Boots Riley, and the actor had spoken frequently against Trump. Nothing, it seems, radicalizes celebrities like a persecution complex.
There’s a difference between a consistent (and complicated) conservative artist like Clint Eastwood — whose role in “Dirty Harry” is an obvious iconographic influence on “Citizen Vigilante” — and tarnished A-listers who cosy up to right-wing power as a survival tactic, just as there’s a difference between principled satirists and grifters like Boll, whose entire output is a study in aggrieved bellicosity.
The latter attitude isn’t exclusive to the right of course — see Alec Baldwin, who appeared with Spacey in the recent Spanish blockbuster “Torrente for President” — but there is a sense now, more than ever, that once a pop-culture warrior has chosen to enlist, there’s no chance of switching sides again.
Back when Hammer was being touted as the next big thing, people wondered if his square jaw and blueblood aura would make him a viable Bruce Wayne (turns out he might have been better suited to a remake of “American Psycho”). With “Citizen Vigilante,” he’s found his superhero role — Musk has made jokes on X about “the sequel being even better.”
It’s a remarkable comeback, but does Hammer feel welcome? And what does it say if he does?
