Spacey’s Bakker: Beyond Satire

Kevin Spacey has a taste for the unusual. The meal of choice during an interview: a half-order of eggs Florentine, a Belgian waffle piled high with strawberries and whipped cream and two extra-creamy cappuccinos on the side. The role of choice for his first starring role in a TV miniseries: fallen televangelist Jim Bakker in NBC’s “Fall From Grace.” Bernadette Peters portrays Tammy Faye Bakker in the film that airs Sunday on NBC (9-11 p.m., Channels 4, 36, 39).

The slightly rumpled Spacey, who likes to wake up for breakfast just in time for lunch, said he turned down the role of Bakker “quite violently” at first but was persuaded by the film’s director, Karen Arthur, that the film would not present a one-dimensional portrait of the Bakkers.

“Things are not always as black and white as they appear--they’re far more bizarre,” said Spacey, a 30-year-old displaced Californian (“I’m a single man living in New York, and oh, it’s more fun than Disneyland,” he deadpans), whose family is a black Labrador named Slate that he found tied to a pole at 2nd Avenue and 10th Street 10 years ago.

“There may be two sets of people who tune in to this movie,” Spacey continued, “the ones who tune in to laugh and the ones who really tune in because they don’t know much about the Bakkers--I was one of those people before I started this.

“But those people who tune in just to see lots of mascara running down cheeks and Jim Bakker with his head under a couch talking about animals will be disappointed, because this isn’t ‘Saturday Night Live.’

“I wouldn’t be interested in any character who wasn’t human,” Spacey said. “I’m always attracted to characters that are in some form on the edge, and facing some kind of moral dilemma. And this interested me because no one had ever played it before. It wasn’t like playing Kennedy or Hitler or someone a lot of actors have played before.”

Spacey, who studied Bakker’s style and mannerisms by watching videotapes from the Bakkers’ PTL cable TV ministry, said he made no attempt to do an imitation of the televangelist, but that he and director Arthur thought it important to try to make Spacey look as much like Jim as possible, with the aid of a special dental device, glasses, “a fairly serious Bakker beehive wig” and an attempt to mimic Bakker’s “Dukakis shoulders” and unique posture.

Bakker is not Spacey’s first out-of-the-ordinary role. He probably is best known to TV audiences from his role on CBS’ “Wiseguy” crime series as multimillionaire megalomaniac Mel Profitt, an archvillain who consults his own toes when he needs advice, wriggling them and chanting with maniacal glee: “Only the toes knows.”

Spacey, who began his training at Juilliard at 19, also played a young reporter in the NBC miniseries, “The Murder of Mary Phagan,” alongside Jack Lemmon, and starred again with Lemmon in a recent PBS “American Playhouse” production of Eugene O’Neill’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He also played a stand-up comedian who doesn’t think he’s funny anymore in the feature film “Rocket Gibraltar.”

Spacey has a longer history in the theater, having launched his Broadway career at 21 starring opposite Liv Ullmann in Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Other plays include a New York Shakespeare Company production of “Henry IV, Part I,” David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” and Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”

While unwilling to brand Bakker innocent or guilty (“I hope the audience will be in a position to make their own judgment”), Spacey did defend Bakker’s position in the Jessica Hahn scandal, in which the former church secretary accused Bakker of raping her. “Whatever happened in that hotel room happened for 15 minutes-- 15 minutes from the time he walked in the door to the time he left,” Spacey said. “And he confessed to his counselor at PTL, went to another pastor, went through four years of counseling. From his point of view, he felt he had been forgiven.”

“Fall From Grace” ends with Bakker’s resignation in disgrace from the PTL, two years before he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. “The legal stuff he was convicted of is clear,” Spacey said. “But I’ve always felt the sentence did not fit the crime. Forty-five years for fraud? I’ve always thought the U.S. government went after him to make him an example.”