[#image: /photos/5582f9d009f0bee56440b914]|||undefined|||[#image: /photos/5582f9d03655c24c6c954353]|||||| ** See Kevin Spacey’s GQ photo shoot**

Kevin Spacey says that he was once ambitious, but that was a long time ago.

"Eleven or so years before American Beauty came out"—so around 1988, when he was just shy of 30—"I put on some very serious blinders and I got on the horse and I galloped toward seeing whether I could build a film career for myself. And you know, when you do something like that, have a certain kind of ambition that is very singular and very much about yourself, it is an incredibly selfish twelve years. Now, I’m not saying that everything I did was selfish or that I was only playing roles that drove that, but I was on a kind of mission to see if I could achieve something. To achieve a career at a certain level and in the way in which I wanted to have a career, playing with the kind of people I wanted to play with. I wanted to play in a certain league."

The biggest league?

"Sure. It’s like sports. You play tennis, you want to win Wimbledon, you want to win the U.S. Open."

Spacey won two Oscars—for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty—but he says that by the time he accepted an offer to run the Old Vic theater in London in 2003, that initial burst of ambition was spent. "I’d achieved it," he says. "I didn’t want to spend ten years pursuing the same dream. And I certainly didn’t want to spend ten years showing up in a lot of movies I probably shouldn’t have done, for money. So I took a left turn. It’s the best decision I ever made." (He is still there, overseeing and programming the theater—he has announced that he will leave in 2015. Most years he’s also appearing in productions himself: "No matter how good you might be in a movie, you’ll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That’s the thrill of it.")

But of course it’s not as though Spacey completely turned his back on the screen, and this year he has surfaced with his most mesmerizing character in a long while: the deliciously conniving southern puppet-master congressman Frank Underwood in House of Cards. Spacey is resistant to any compliment about how well he channels malice and deceit. "I’m just fucking happy to have a great job," he says. "I think people love it when anybody acts bad; it’s not particular to me." It’s as though he senses, within such compliments, a slight—one that reduces a complex character portrayal down to a few melodramatic personality traits, and one that belittles the expansive scope of a long and eminent career. But it is belittling nothing to note that, among his many other skills, Spacey is a master of intermittently repressed malevolence: Each time his eyes gleam and flicker, you wonder how bad what happens next may turn out to be.

House of Cards has reunited Spacey with David Fincher, who directed Spacey in one of the great roles of his ambition years, as the serial killer in Se7en. (More recently Spacey was also a producer of Fincher’s The Social Network.) "I suppose one of the reasons I love working with Fincher so much is because it’s like working with somebody with an X-Acto blade," Spacey says. "He just manages to get rid of all the shit and all the crap and all the fat and all the things you can bring to something. When you’re just able to distill it down to the idea and the feeling that a character is experiencing in a scene, it can become very, very razor sharp and really clean and really efficient and simple. And sometimes it takes twenty-five years to learn how to be simple."