James Spader was too unsettling for TV. Now Marvel gives Ultron his face

James Spader

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 7, 1960 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Avengers: Age of Ultron, Stargate, Lincoln
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · 3 Emmy · Satellite Award

When David E. Kelley wanted James Spader to play the lawyer Alan Shore, the answer he got from the people around him was blunt. “I was told that no one would ever welcome James Spader into their living room,” Kelley later recalled. The warning had a certain logic. On screen Spader had been the rich boy with the sneer, the drifter with the camcorder, the man aroused by car wrecks. He went into those living rooms anyway, week after week, for most of two decades, and Marvel is now building a series around the face it once hid behind a robot.

That face is the whole argument of VisionQuest, the Disney+ series that brings back Ultron, the artificial intelligence Spader voiced and performed in Avengers: Age of Ultron. This time the villain spends most of his screen time in human form, grey-haired, bearded and bespectacled. The show’s creator, Terry Matalas, has rejected the idea that this was a way to save money on effects. “It’s funny, people say it’s a budget thing, it’s not, it’s a James Spader thing,” he told Polygon. Spader is frank about the earlier version. In the film, he says, Ultron “was a vehicle for the Avengers story”; in the series the weight falls on Ultron, Paul Bettany‘s Vision and Thomas Shepherd, the young man played by Ruaridh Mollica.

His parents, Jean and Todd Spader, were both teachers, and the youngest of their three children, born in Boston on February 7, 1960, grew up around the Massachusetts private schools where they worked. His mother taught art at the Pike School in Andover; his father taught at Brooks School. Spader later moved on to Phillips Academy, left at seventeen and went to New York. Before the parts came he tended bar, taught yoga, drove a meat truck, loaded railroad cars and mucked out stables.

Hollywood first used him as a type. After a first significant film role in Endless Love and his first lead in Tuff Turf, he played Steff in Pretty in Pink, the wealthy, contemptuous boy at the center of John Hughes’s teen class war. In Less Than Zero he was Rip, a drug dealer, and he filled smaller parts in Wall Street and Baby Boom. The pale hair and the half-lidded calm did a lot of the work. Studios cast the surface.

Steven Soderbergh cast what was underneath. In Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Spader played Graham, a drifter who records women talking about their sex lives and complicates the lives of three people in Baton Rouge. The film made Soderbergh’s name, and in 1989 the Cannes jury gave Spader its best actor prize. The voyeur was quiet, polite and impossible to read, and that combination became his instrument.

What followed in the 1990s looks, in hindsight, like a refusal to become a conventional leading man. He was a young, wealthy widower opposite Susan Sarandon in White Palace and a yuppie led astray by Rob Lowe in Bad Influence. He took the closest thing he ever had to a blockbuster lead, the Egyptologist Daniel Jackson in Stargate, and then went straight into David Cronenberg’s Crash, playing James Ballard, a man for whom collisions are erotic. In 2002 he was Mr. Grey in Secretary, the lawyer whose sadomasochistic arrangement with his assistant the film treats as a love story.

Television changed the scale. Kelley got his way, and Alan Shore arrived in the final season of The Practice before carrying the spin-off Boston Legal until 2008. Shore was Spader’s screen persona with the volume up, a man of loose ethics and long closing speeches, and voters loved him: Spader won the Emmy for lead actor in a drama in 2004, 2005 and 2007, one of very few actors to win for the same character in two different series. He went to Broadway in 2009 for David Mamet’s Race, then turned a two-scene guest spot on The Office into a full season as Robert California. “Those two scenes became a season,” as executive producer Paul Lieberstein put it.

The decade that defined him for a global audience began in 2013 with The Blacklist. On NBC, Spader played Raymond “Red” Reddington, one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, who turns himself in and starts trading names. He was also an executive producer, and the show ran ten seasons and 218 episodes, earning him two Golden Globe nominations. Red’s fedora, his digressive anecdotes and the soft pause before a threat became a brand of their own.

They also became a crutch. The Blacklist was built on a single question, who Reddington really was, and it never answered it outright. Showrunner John Eisendrath had said that if it were up to him, viewers would know exactly who Red was. They did not. The finale, in July 2023, sent Red to a cattle ranch in Spain to stand still before a charging bull. Spader defended the ending as complete, a circle closing. Read less generously, the series had discovered that its star’s mannerisms could hold an audience longer than its mythology could, and spent its later seasons leaning on him to cover the gap.

Off screen Spader keeps his life mostly out of print. He married the decorator Victoria Kheel in 1987, having met her at the yoga studio where she worked; they had two sons, and he filed for divorce in 2004. His partner since 2002 is the actress Leslie Stefanson, his co-star in Alien Hunter, with whom he has a son. In a 2014 Rolling Stone profile he described himself as obsessive-compulsive, and said the trait serves the work, because nothing slips past him.

VisionQuest screens its first two episodes at the BFI London Film Festival on October 12 and arrives on Disney+ on October 14, with eight episodes in total. For an actor once judged too disquieting for the family television set, the casting carries a dry joke: the machine that wanted to replace humanity has decided it would rather look like James Spader.