The turning point for Spacey's career came in 1995, when he starred in a string of successful hits ranging from Se7en to Outbreak, and then the film that would go on to win him his first of two Academy Awards, The Usual Suspects. Spacey played the sinister character Verbal, who by the end of the movie, helped pull off one of the greatest plot twists of all time. If the role seems like the perfect pairing of character and actor, well, that's because the part had actually been written with Spacey in mind.
According to separate interviews with the film's director and screenwriter, Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie, respectively, Spacey got the part after he approached them at a screening of their 1993 film Public Access and said he'd love to work with them. "There's something sly and fun about him that's perfect for a trickster mastermind like Verbal," Singer told The Guardian in 2016.
McQuarrie, who admitted he'd been trying to work with Spacey for years, told Cinetropolis in 2014 that the timing for the role and where Spacey was at in his career were perfect. "If you'd put the biggest actor in the movie in the role of Verbal, the audience would be thinking, 'When is Dustin Hoffman going to stop limping?'" McQuarrie said, adding,"Kevin, who is a very gifted actor, was not the guy you would expect to suddenly be the villain, especially at that stage in his career."
