It isn't black and white with Kevin Spacey

Istanbul is more than 5,000 miles from Wall Street, but Kevin Spacey has been making his presence felt in both. A week or so ago, he brought the Sam Mendes-directed "Richard III" to the Harbiye Muhsin Ertugrul Sahnesi theater in the ancient Turkish city. "It was a really good audience," the actor said by phone, moments after leaving the stage. "We opened last night, do four more and then move on to Naples." And San Francisco, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney and Doha, Qatar. The production, which originated at London's Old Vic, ends its run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in January.

Sooner than that -- Oct. 21, in fact -- moviegoers can see Spacey play a different kind of tortured monarch: "Margin Call," debuting writer-director J.C. Chandor's dialogue-and-character-driven take on the financial meltdown, features Spacey as Sam Rogers, a high-ranking member of a high-flying Manhattan financial house, whose investment in risk has overtaken its assets. Rather than panic -- and there's much reason to -- Sam's superior (Jeremy Irons) decides to sell the company's worthless holdings to whoever will buy them, before the bloodhounds of Wall Street have a chance to sniff out that the firm is doomed. In a business built on trust, it's the equivalent of a murder-suicide.

Playing the ambiguous

But unlike the homicidal hunchbacked king of "Richard III," which has earned Spacey rave reviews this season, the hero of "Margin Call" is not a font of unbridled villainy, but moral ambiguity.

"What attracted me, what always attracts me," Spacey said, "is that if you're going to be playing a character who's not all white and not all black, but maybe gray, which is frankly where most people live, then at least you can try to create a human being, and then let an audience make a decision.

"I played a much broader caricature recently of a horrible boss," Spacey said, referring to "Horrible Bosses," which co-starred Jennifer Aniston and Colin Farrell, "but that was a comedy fueled by a certain energy. Here, I play this man who's the moral compass of the movie. The other one was fun, but that's more typical of what you see in the movies. I suppose there was a little part of me that said, when I read the 'Margin Call' script, 'That's the role Jack Lemmon would have played.' That made me smile."

Spacey, who played opposite his longtime hero in "Glengarry Glen Ross," has been -- like Lemmon -- an actor's actor. From the time he played Mel Proffit on TV's "Wiseguy" in the late '80s through his Oscar-winning roles in "The Usual Suspects" and "American Beauty" to the more recent efforts at the hallowed Old Vic -- where he has been artistic director since 2003 -- Spacey has been ranked among America's better actors. England's too, perhaps: Praising Spacey's "powerful central performance" in "Richard III," the Guardian's Michael Billington wrote, "What is impressive about Spacey is that he acts with every fiber of his being. His voice has acquired a rougher, darker edge . . . he still bustles about the stage with ferocious energy."

Conversely, Sam Rogers is a subdued character, one in whom emotions roil, but whose issues are more pedestrian and hence universal: He's not faced with questions about how to seize a throne, but to choose between his self-respect and the firm to which he's devoted his professional life. The barons of Wall Street are not currently in much favor. In fact, they're objects of much derision. "And that's because it's a very easy and human reaction to look for someone to blame and an industry to blame," Spacey said. "So it's an easy thing to point fingers. I've known bankers, and the truth is, as I hope you can see in the film, every time you think you've met the top person, there's someone else they have to answer to. This guy, then that guy, and you start to realize that the decisions ultimately made are not made by the kind of character that I'm playing. The guy I play is among the ones who did their level best to stop the decisions that were being made because they thought it was going to destroy the market. And, by the way, their careers."

Spacey has taken his own career in several abrupt directions. His Old Vic tenure will end in 2015, he says. "Then I will move on, and it will be time for this theater to have new blood," he said. "It will have been 11 years, and I made a commitment for 10." Foreshadowing Richard III and Sam Rogers in its own strange way was Spacey's portrayal of Jack Abramoff ("Casino Jack"), another character he sees in shades of gray. "I don't know why, but I relish the challenge of taking someone everyone has essentially dismissed, and putting flesh and bone and a beating heart in them and maybe letting people go, 'Oh, wow, I sort of understand that now.'"

Shakespeare was the Bard

While Spacey finds wiggle room in the morality of his various characters, he has no qualms about another issue: The authorship of Shakespeare's plays. It's the subject of the upcoming costume drama "Anonymous" and sure to fuel the debate over whether the Bard was the Bard we know, and not the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe. The clincher for Spacey was a portrait of Shakespeare unveiled in 2009 and reputedly the only one painted during his lifetime.

"I went up to Toronto where it was on display," Spacey said, "and it was incredible, because it was done when he was 37 years old, and an actor at the Globe and a major playwright. But the most remarkable thing is the naughty look in his eyes -- as if he is a man who gets the joke of life. And I looked at that face and absolutely believed for the first time that that man wrote those plays. And I have never doubted since."