Kevin Spacey to be the devil in Italian film, The Contract

It’s hard to imagine how Kevin Spacey’s PR people sleep at night, but it’s also hard to deny that they’re damn good at their jobs. Not only has the disgraced actor managed to crawl back onto the silver screen since being found not guilty in his UK sexual assault trial (he was, unfortunately, right that people were ready to hire him “the second” his charges were dropped), but he’s also figured out how to effectively manipulate his search engine results while doing it.

Before today, it was probably far easier to find an entirely different story if you googled “Kevin Spacey devil.” Today, the top results are all about the actor’s newest starring role from Italian director Massimo Paolucci, in his psychological thriller, The Contract. You guessed it: Spacey will be playing literal Satan. Cool!

This comes from Variety, which reports that the film just completed principal photography in Rome. In a statement, it was described as having a similar plot to Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987) or Taylor Hackford’s The Devil’s Advocate (1997). Spacey plays a character named “The Devil” (we’re not joking) that resembles Robert De Niro’s role in the former film (“a satanic businessman who hires a seedy gumshoe detective to descend into hell”) and Al Pacino’s in the latter (“satan who takes the guise of a human lawyer”). Producers Massimiliano Caroletti and Sandro Lazzarini apparently “courted” Spacey for eight months to convince him to take the role, so he’s not even the one doing the begging.

The Contract isn’t the only film Spacey has in the hopper. Peter Five Eight, a thriller from director Michael Zaiko Hall that also stars Rebecca de Mornay and Jet Jandreau, will open in a limited release later this month. Since Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp first accused him of assault in 2017, Spacey has also filmed Italian drama The Man Who Drew God (2o22) and appeared as a voiceover in Gene Fallaize’s 2023 thriller, Control. He also appeared in James Cox’s Billionaire Boys Club in 2018, which was filmed prior to—but released after—the allegations.