Oh to have a picture of this meeting – or be a fly on the wall.
On the same day that he won a Screen Actors Guild Award in Los Angeles, Kevin Spacey was spotted dining with the Emirati director Ali F Mostafa at Caramel Restaurant & Lounge in Dubai.
“The two talked and dined unperturbed by other patrons,” Caramel reported via a press release.
The meeting was on Sunday night, presumably after the actor finished watching 34 actors he had mentored for two weeks perform Hassan Abdulrazzak's Dhow Under the Sun at the Sharjah Institute of Theatrical Arts. (The play was a culmination of the Home Grown project, a collaboration between the Kevin Spacey Foundation and the Middle East Theatre Academy.)
One can imagine that Spacey was dining at the invite of Mostafa, whose second feature From A to B is wrapping up its run in UAE theatres after opening the Abu Dhabi Film Festival last year. Or was it Spacey who asked to dine with the face of Emirati cinema? Could the pair have been discussing some sort of collaboration? Is it possible Spacey could pop up in Mostafa's next feature? Ooh – might Mostafa have a walk-on role in an upcoming episode of Spacey's Netflix show House of Cards, playing some sort of political figure from the Middle East?
We just wish the notoriously private Spacey – who gave The National's Arts&Life writer Rebecca McLaughlin-Duane a world print-exclusive interview while he was here – would tweet some clues. And a picture of the pair together. Or anything, really, about his time here.
Spacey won the SAG Award – and a Golden Globe Award earlier this month – for his work portraying the quietly terrifying American politician Frank Underwood on House of Cards, which begins streaming the third season February 27. He adds the hardware to his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award win for the 1995 film The Usual Suspects.
Spacey made a stopover in Dublin on his way back to the United States, appearing as a guest on the first episode of The Anton Savage Show on the station Today FM and speaking about his preference for theatre over film work.
As for the frenetic pace the 55-year-old actor keeps up between shooting seasons of his show, he told Savage he had no interest in “sitting around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in Beverly Hills and collecting residual cheques”.
And although he’s left the UAE, best be on the lookout for him – and tell us what you see. As Spacey told us over the weekend: “I’m here quite often just not publicly. I’m in a lot of places where people don’t know I am. I don’t like to announce that I’m coming and I don’t do a lot of interviews, but I’m always about.”
amcqueen@thenational.ae
