Of Course Kevin Spacey Is Starring in a Low-Budget Italian Film About a Wrongly Accused Pedophile

File this one under “no one is ever truly canceled if they’re rich and famous enough to make other people money”: disgraced actor Kevin Spacey — who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 20 men (several of whom were underage at the time of the incidents) — is making his return to the big screen in an Italian film about, you guessed it, a man wrongly accused of being a pedophile.

Spacey will reportedly have a small role in L’uomo che Disegnò Dio (The Man Who Drew God), which is directed by Franco Nero, making it Spacey’s first onscreen appearance since 2017, when the allegations against him first began coming out. According to The Guardian, he’ll play “a police officer investigating the case of a man — played by the director, Franco Nero — who can draw people by listening to their voices, despite not being able to see and is wrongly accused of sexually abusing children.” Vanessa Redgrave will also star as the accused man’s piano teacher.

“I’m very happy Kevin agreed to participate in my film,” Nero told ABC News. “I consider him a great actor and I can’t wait to start the movie.”

Spacey has lucked out this far in terms of facing any legal consequences for his alleged behavior; in October 2019, prosecutors in Los Angeles rejected a sexual battery case against him because the accuser had died, and in July of last year, prosecutors in Massachusetts dropped a case after the 18-year-old accusing Spacey of groping him refused to testify. But he’s not out of the woods yet: a Scotland Yard investigation into his behavior during his time at the Old Vic theater is still reportedly ongoing, and in September 2020, actor Anthony Rapp and another man filed a lawsuit against Spacey accusing him of sexually assaulting them when they were underage teens in the ’80s.

So, given that he’s still embroiled in a few legal battles over alleged sex crimes involving minors, one would think that Spacey would perhaps benefit from laying low and not, say, making a movie about a pedophile. But Spacey has remained weirdly in the public eye since the allegations against him came out in 2017, posting a bizarre Christmas Eve video message every year addressing the claims against him, sometimes in character as House of Cards protagonist Frank Underwood. He also recently likened the surge in unemployment in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic to his own situation.

“I don’t think it will come as a surprise for anyone to say that my world completely changed in the fall of 2017,” he said while appearing on a podcast in December. “My job, many of my relationships, my standing in my own industry were all gone in just a matter of hours. And so I do have empathy for what it feels like to suddenly be told that you can’t go back to work or that you might lose your job.”