Brian Cox: ‘I’ve Never Found Kevin Spacey Abusive’ and ‘How Dare You Cancel Anybody?’

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Brian Cox defended Kevin Spacey in a new interview with U.K. publication The i Paper, calling the Oscar winner “an old friend of mine” and asking the public: “How dare you cancel anybody?” Spacey has not worked in Hollywood since being accused by several men of sexual misconduct starting in 2017. “Kevin is an old friend of mine,” Cox said. “All right, Kevin did certain things… He also did a lot of extraordinary work.

And I find that really petty, and I just don’t like it. It’s sneaky and petty and not right.” “Not everybody is abusive. I’ve never found Kevin Spacey abusive,” he continued. “He was misguided, certainly, in terms of his sexuality, but that’s to do with him coming to terms with his own sexuality and how he’s dealt with that, and the dilemma that it’s caused in his life” “We’ve got to an age now where people are going, ‘Oh, that’s bad, he’s out, boom, he’s cancelled,’” Cox concluded. “What do you mean ‘cancelled’?

How dare you cancel anybody?” Since claims of Spacey’s alleged inappropriate behavior and sexual assault first arose in the wake of the #MeToo movement in 2017, several legal cases have been brought against the two-time Oscar winner.

In 2022, a jury in New York concluded that he did not molest actor Anthony Rapp, who had accused him of sexual assault in the early 1980s when Rapp was 14.