How does a person stay sane in a wacky place like Hollywood?

It seems reasonable to wonder, given the unflattering portrayal of Tinseltown in movies such as “Shrink,” a film in which almost everyone, including the psychiatrist, needs therapy. So we put the question to actor Kevin Spacey, who plays self-help author and shrink-to-the-stars Henry Carter, a pot-and-booze-abusing mess of a man whose patients include a sexaholic actor (Robin Williams) and a germaphobic talent agent (Dallas Roberts) whose negotiating tactics include paying interns to deposit human feces on the doorsteps of recalcitrant producers.
Piece of cake, says the two-time Oscar winner, who turned 50 this week. “I’m not there.”
For the past seven years, Spacey has made his home in London, where he is halfway through a 10-season commitment as artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre, taking on the lead in “Richard III,” directing the British premiere of Maria Goos’ play “Cloaca” and recruiting such big-name American talent as the late director Robert Altman and actor Jeff Goldblum. “Shrink” is the first movie Spacey has shot in Los Angeles in eight years. Even when he did live stateside, he was a New Yorker, watching what he calls the “self-indulgence” of Hollywood “with as much amazement as anybody else does. And from a great distance.”
According to the notoriously private actor, the 24-7 nature of our obsession with celebrity for its own sake has gotten worse since he left Hollywood. “When I was there ... there was not a situation where you walked out of a Starbucks and there were five people with video cameras wanting to ask you questions, as if you were doing an interview. There just seems to be a kind of accepted lifestyle that I find very odd and very narcissistic. As if anyone gives a rat’s (rear end) about what people are doing when they’re going to Starbucks.”
The glare of the spotlight may be no less bright in London, though it doesn’t seem to bother Spacey. “I don’t have to contend with it,” he says, “because I have managed to negotiate my life so that I don’t. You can make that choice. You can also make the choice that the only restaurants that you ever go to are the ones where the photographers are. You can negotiate your life so that everything you do is a public event.”
In any event, Spacey insists that his move to England was less of an escape than an embrace of new challenges. “I wasn’t walking away from something,” he says. “I was walking TOWARD something, and creating something.”
Besides, Spacey says, Hollywood isn’t quite an unmitigated cesspool. “The good thing about the industry is that there are just as many genuine people as there are people who are full of (expletive). You just have to dig beneath the rubble to find them.”
In that regard, he believes he has been very lucky. Lucky and stubborn. At least when it comes to making what he calls “careful” choices.
“When I was offered movies, when I was starting out, and that I turned down, I remember agents yelling at me, `Who the (expletive) do you think you are? This is a good move for you!’ And I was like, `Well, I don’t want to do that movie. And I don’t want to work with these people. And I don’t care what you think.’ I don’t think you have to become well-known and then decide that you have integrity. I think you decide first.”
Integrity. Choosing carefully. Assiduously guarding one’s privacy. Not to mention living 5,000 miles away from Wilshire Boulevard. This, it seems, is Dr. Spacey’s prescription for keeping his head in a world that appears to have lost its own.
But there’s something else, too, and it’s only the tiniest bit nutty. It has been reported that the actor has just one non-negotiable demand whenever he signs a movie contract. To wit: that the studio provide him with ready access to ... table tennis. True? Absolutely true, Spacey admits. “As long as there’s a Ping-Pong table nearby, then I’m a happy guy.”