Kevin Spacey hosted the Tony Awards.
And you’d think it would’ve been just another Donald Trump roast party like every other awards show has been since he won the election.
But Spacey actually avoided the Trump jokes, and even more surprising, cracked a hilarious joke about the Hillary email scandal.
Breitbart reports:
“Actor Kevin Spacey donned a gray wig to play Bill Clinton during his hosting gig at Sunday night’s Tony Awards and cracked a joke about Hillary Clinton’s email controversy in between award presentations.
‘We’ve had some exciting young performers this season,’ Spacey-as-Clinton said, imitating the former president’s Arkansas drawl.
‘Ben Platt was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. That’s very impressive. I was on that list a couple times.’
‘But Ben, you know who you bumped off that list? My wife,’ Spacey continued, as Platt — the star of the Broadway hit Dear Evan Hansen — sank down in his seat in mock embarrassment.
‘Between you and me, you might be a better singer, but after seeing your show, there’s no doubt Hillary is much better at creating fake email accounts than you!’
‘I just wanted to do a joke nobody would ever think I’d do. But I’m gonna get in trouble when I get home,’ a laughing Spacey added, still in character as Clinton.”
You can watch the joke here:
WATCH Kevin Spacey as Pres. Bill Clinton make a joke about Sec. Clinton’s emails: #TonyAwards2017 pic.twitter.com/cXtePK0rwJ
— Raw Story (@RawStory) June 12, 2017
Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright star in the hit Netflix show House of Cards.
The show is based on a UK show of the exact same title, but when it was brought to the states to be rebooted, showrunner Beau Willimon retooled the main characters to be exactly like Bill and Hillary Clinton.
In fact, it seems like Willimon is a little obsessed with the Clintons because his 2008 play Farragut North – and later the movie The Ides of March – featured a sex scandal also eerily similar to Bill Clinton’s.
But in House of Cards, the power couple are literally murderers and bi-sexually promiscuous as an unapologetic view of the Clintons and their thirst for power.
Vox reported:
“House of Cards all but suggests that all the worst rumors ever spread about the Clintons — in both their personal and professional lives — are true. But it also gains a certain poignancy from pondering a question that many have thought about but few have fictionalized quite like the show has: Just how are these two still married to each other?
What’s unique about House of Cards is that its solution for Clinton-related disappointment doesn’t involve any policymaking, either domestic or foreign. Instead, it hints that the Clintons should have just started killing people and sowing chaos.
There are differences, of course. Most notably, while Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) has the white trash roots and genial folksiness of Bill Clinton, his deeply repressed bisexuality presents the opposite set of problems as those encountered by his real-life forebear.
Claire (Robin Wright), with her cool, classy vibe and regal air, is closer to the real-life Hillary Clinton — but in her embrace of destruction and chaos, she simultaneously feels sort of like one of those “Texts From Hillary” memes come to life.
As such, House of Cards attempts to analyze the Clinton marriage in search of answers, then arrives at the most boring conclusion for what draws the two together you could ever think of: They covet power.”
It was incredibly refreshing to see a powerhouse actor like Kevin Spacey veer away from doing yet another Trump joke. More actors should follow his lead.