IT CAN BE hard to keep track of the constantly shifting spaces of politics and culture, so you can be forgiven if you’ve missed arguably the biggest development in either space over the past few months, playing out as we speak: James Spader is back. The actor, who has spent four decades specializing in playing many different styles of pervert, has returned as yet another one in Disney+’s VisionQuest, the third and final chapter in a trilogy that also included WandaVision and Agatha All Along, and a work that might also be one of the first real considerations we’ve seen of a dystopian post-human world navigated exclusively by artificial intelligence agents. The show may not be for everyone, but Spader, as has often been the case since the ’80s, is doing truly unbelievable work.
Spader plays the physical manifestation of Ultron—the proto-AI doombot he voiced in 2015’s Avengers: The Age of Ultron, who has now assumed the form of James Spader, sporting a feral salt-and-pepper beard, hexagonal specs, and defense against the dark arts professor loungewear. He is glorious, bloviating on subjects from cyberpunk philosophy to fatherhood in a scotch and cigar baritone with a hint of mischief dancing behind his eyes. With each passing VisionQuest episode, Spader not only helps push the show’s knotty plotting forward, but chews on each bit of scenery with the best of them (he’s particularly effective when sharing the screen with T'Nia Miller, who plays another high-minded scientist-turned-synthetic being).
Spader’s history as the magnetic degenerate who captivated Hollywood in the ’80s and ’90s is more than evident in each episode of Marvel’s latest series, especially if you know where to look for it. Spader, now 66, started his career as a calculating piece of shit in Pretty in Pink, before hitting it big on the American indie film scene, starting in Steven Soderbergh’s smash hit Sex, Lies & Videotape as, what else? An unnervingly direct, impotent drifter who interviews women on camera about their sexual experiences then beats off to the footage.
From there he had brushes with conventional stardom in kind of blockbusters like Stargate, or, trying to belie his lot in life, miscast as straight men to Rob Lowe or John Cusack, but through the ’90s he becomes the maestro of the psychosexual thriller, showing up as obsessive compulsive rapist werewolves, hitchhiking gamblers, hooker-banging lawyers, and widowers who can’t get their face out of Susan Sarandon’s crotch. When you work on projects like these—writing about the entirety of a successful working actor’s filmography—there’s often a staggering level of diversity between genres and roles. What’s staggering about Spader’s career is how little of anything else there is.
It’s all delinquent sicko shit. It is poetic that for the most part, at the turn of the century, Spader migrates to television right around the time the sex thriller goes out of style. He ages, and wins long overdue acting trophies, on the small screen.
Perhaps most interestingly, Spader now may be as interesting a presence as he ever has been. Through the years, he’s gained weight and lost hair and his voice has deepened, but he continues to ooze libertine, alpha sexuality and idiosyncratic intensity. With his return to Marvel as a face, as well as a voice, the time was right to clarify, in the parlance of basketball clip packages on YouTube, “James Spader was a problem,” in several senses of the word.
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