Actor Kevin Spacey has been ordered to pay the “House of Cards” producer $31 million in damages for breach of contract and to mitigate damages caused by his behavior while filming.
The fine was approved by an arbitration court last year, but only became known on Monday, when producer MCR filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, demanding payment of the amount.
According to the newspaper The Hollywood Reporter (owned by MCR), the arbitral tribunal found that the Representative had breached the terms of the Contract with his conduct, After a production assistant was accused of sexual harassment.
The complaint came in a series of testimonies against Spacey, the two-Oscar winner in The Usual Suspects (1995) and American Beauty (1999), who witnessed the collapse of his career in 2017 after several allegations of sexual assault.
When the cases emerged, the producer canceled the actor’s role in “House of Cards,” having completely rewrote the sixth season and reduced the number of episodes from 13 to eight to meet the release date announced by Netflix.
The company behind other shows such as “Ozark” and “The Shrink Next Door” claimed during the trial that the actor did not provide his services in a “professional manner” or in accordance with its conduct policies.
Kevin Spacey appealed the judge’s decision, but his request was denied this month.
The actor’s last appearance was in “Billionaire Boys Club” (2018), where he returned to the big screen in 2022 with a small role in the Italian film “L’uomo Che Disegno Dio” (“The Man Who Drawn God”, in simple translation).
In recent years, Kevin Spacey has posted several cryptic videos on social media playing his character from the “House of Cards” series, Frank Underwood.
In 2019, two lawsuits against the actor reached the courts, but the trial did not proceed.
In California, a massage therapist accused Spacey of sexual assault, which allegedly occurred in 2016, but died before the attorney general’s office brought charges, and in Massachusetts, a young man who accused him of another assault that same year dropped a charge.