When Kevin Spacey entered his trailer, he was wearing slacks and a salmon blazer, and when he emerges, he is Tennis Man, in head-to-toe Adidas gear. Cap, navy T-shirt, flashy yellow sneakers. He unlocks the passenger door of a fire-engine red Nissan 370z for me, slides into the driver's seat and plants a heavy foot on the gas pedal while his security guy, assistant and trainer follow in another car. We're in danger of being late.
In a matter of minutes, Britain's top-ranked player, Andy Murray, will begin his third-round match at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., and Spacey, a self-described Murray "groupie," does not intend to miss a point. He has crisscrossed the globe during the past two-plus years to watch Murray play more than a dozen times. And for this mid-March tournament, Spacey rented a house nearby, alternating between watching Murray play and working on his own game with a pair of professional coaches.
What is it about Murray, I ask.
It's his athleticism, says Spacey, who himself is looking quite fit, and his drive. Plus, he adds, "I'm a Brit."
A what? Spacey was born in New Jersey, raised in California. But for the past decade, he has called London home, so this apparently is who he is now.
We pull up to the Indian Wells Tennis Garden a little after 11 a.m., and Spacey sorts through a collection of VIP badges. He has been told that a seat in Murray's box, where he has sat before, isn't available because Murray's coach, girlfriend and hitting partners are in it; but he's offered the next best thing, Box 117,
close enough to make eye contact, if ever Murray were to break focus. "I've often thought about whispering to him, 'Keyser Soze is behind you,' " jokes Spacey, referring to the villain character in the 1995 thriller The Usual Suspects who won him his first Oscar. At least I think he's joking. The delivery is so deadpan, it's hard to be sure.
Murray blows the first set in a tie-break, and his opponent, a 70-something seed
nobody knows anything about, pulls ahead in the second. His confidence appears temporarily rocked, but not Spacey's. "Come on," he bellows from his courtside seat, clapping hard every time Murray hits a winner -- and groaning each time he doesn't. He microanalyzes Murray's game as though it were a character he was considering playing.
Before the match is over, Spacey has one of his two coaches, Keith, who used to hit with Murray, push back his flight to Miami so that the two can squeeze in more practice. "Kevin doesn't half-ass anything," his producing partner Dana Brunetti will tell me later. "Once he gets into something -- working out, learning to play a musical instrument -- he goes into it full bore. So, he's always been a fan of tennis, but lately it's become an obsession."