James Spader Has Never Been Afraid to Get Horny on Main

Our product picks are editor-tested, expert-approved. We may earn a commission through links on our site. Why Trust Us?Jason Speakman/MH Illustration/Marvel Studios/NBC/Universal/Miramax/Alliance Releasing8 min readIT 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.Marvel StudiosSpader, 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. People today might not realize there was a time a Hollywood star could be defined by playing, and presenting to the public as a seductive, creepy, sex pest weirdo, and there was a steady diet of projects that gave them opportunities to do that specific thing on screen. In Spader’s work specifically, we see a moment in American life and culture when Hollywood still had the guts, and the temerity, to be horny on main.Pretty in Pink (1986)ParamountSpader has referred to himself as “Brat Pack Adjacent,” emerging with that cohort of young stars but never quite “of” them. His primary moment comes in this John Hughes classic as an asshole who wears a blazer to school with the sleeves cuffed. He might be the gold standard of a quintessential sniveling ‘80s high school bully this side of William Zabka.Watch It HereLess Than Zero (1987)20th Century StudiosIt makes sense that near the beginning, then at the outset of the late period of his career, Spader faced off against Robert Downey Jr., because in a certain light Spader can be seen as Downey’s slightly misshapen clone. Both are twitchy, motor-mouthed wise-asses incapable of a straight line delivery, who contain deep and limitless reserves of quippy charisma, only Spader’s juice is slightly tainted. Downey is right on the line of smarmy and seductive, and Spader is just over it. He’s alluring but a little off-putting, a little annoying, a little frightening, and always compelling. In Less Than Zero you worry for Downey, lost in Bret Easton Ellis’s debauched Los Angeles Neverland. You don’t worry about Spader, who is right where he wants to be, operating with impunity and ruling comfortably in hell.Buy It HereSex Lies and Videotape (1989)MiramaxSpader’s first mature role is less “Spadery” than basically anything he'd done before or would do afterward, thanks in large part to the way he weaponizes his soft-spoken openness. He’s the only character in the film who is honest about who he is and what he wants in a seedy drama where everyone lies or elides, talking around their desires.Watch It HereStargate (1994)MGMYoung Roland Emmerich was aiming for a dumbass version of an ‘80s Spielberg space adventure, so for his version of Richard Dreyfuss, he chose shaggy, adorable, baby James Spader in an era when oddballs like Nic Cage could become action stars. Spader went in a different direction with his career, but we’ll always have this performance as a linguist/allergy-prone dweeb with a shoulder-length shag presenting ancient aliens as an academic argument, using hieroglyphics to unlock an artifact liquid portal that transports you across the universe. He’s perfectly paired with Kurt Russell, as two different phenotypes of asshole.Watch It HereCrash (1996) Alliance ReleasingNo two movies have led to more hilarious mix-ups than this David Cronenberg-directed pervert classic, adapted from a J.G. Ballard novel about people with a desire for sex wrapped in a desire for self-immolation, and Paul Haggis’s shallow, sappy, Oscar-winning exploration of race relations of the exact same title. There’s too much to say about this film to confine it to a blurb, but I’ll just mention that a mere 25 minutes into the film, Spader is having sex with America’s Sweetheart, Holly Hunter. At this point, she is the widow of a man who died in a car accident with Spader. They are in a car identical to the one that killed her husband, one that Spader has just purchased and nearly wrecked again, with both Spader and Hunter in the car. One of the most depraved films I’ve ever seen. Watch it immediately.Buy It HereCurtain Call (1998), The Watcher (2000), Speaking of Sex (2001)UniversalBefore moving to TV, Spader had a wild turn of the century: He’s in a lot of duds that don’t really know what to do with him. In a way, it exposes what a unique and specific tool he is, making his long, prolific career even harder to wrap your head around—because we see how easily it can go wrong for him. One is a bizarre ghost rom-com with Michael Caine and Maggie Smith, another is a near unwatchable post-Seven thriller with an egregiously bad Keanu Reeves as the antagonist killer, and the last, an abhorrent sex comedy. It’s interesting to watch Spader fail, trying to fight against his nature and remake himself into something closer to a conventional leading man. Luckily, he found a medium that better understood how to channel his dark peculiarities.Buy Curtain Call HereWatch The Watcher HereWatch Speaking of Sex HereSecretary (2002)Lions Gate FilmsAnother fetish movie, this one based on a Mary Gaitskill short story. Or, as I like to think of it, “Straight Pillion.” Spader is perfectly measured here as a stammering, mean, tender dom that uses his OCD in a film about control and submission.Watch It HereBoston Legal (2004–2008) ABCAfter a test run on The Practice, this is the beginning of James Spader: TV star, the dawn of the persona that will become his final form. The show may appear to be a conventional primetime legal drama, and sometimes it is, but it possesses deranged and horny mid-aughts sexual politics that would cause riots if it came on air today. This is because it feels tailored to Spader (and co-star William Shatner) and his various kinks and proclivities.Watch It HereThe Office (2010–2011)NBC“There is no such thing as a product, don’t ever think there is. There is only sex. Everything is sex. You understand that what I’m telling you is a universal truth?” This is how much of a generation of Americans first meets Spader, as the enigmatic boss daddy Robert California, on an NBC sitcom that was averaging nearly seven million viewers per episode at the time. When Steve Carell exited The Office, Ed Helms stepped into his role in Dunder Mifflin’s office as well as the sitcom’s dynamic as goofy office manager. But Spader also came along, injecting something entirely different. As California, he’s a literal confidence man whose tieless collar is unbuttoned, his receding hair is tousled, and he holds a dark hypnotic power over the office—one not even John Krasinski’s cool-headed Jim is immune to. Throughout the show’s eighth season, the entire office competes for the favor of Spader’s expert power-dynamic manipulator, a soft reprisal of his role in Secretary.Watch It Here The Blacklist (2013–2023)NBCAfter spending weeks delving into this strange, delightful filmography, it pains me to think there are many people out there of a certain age who will mainly think of Spader as “The Blacklist guy,” but that’s what 218 episodes and 10 years in a role will do to your public perception. Despite frequent notices it was filming in my neighborhood for many years, I never caught this show on air. Having screened a few for consideration, I now see it as both a step down, and a fulfillment of Spader’s whole career journey. On one hand, he’s something of a diet Hannibal Lecter, a mastermind criminal who turns himself over to the Feds to help take down criminals worse than he is (for reasons that aren’t initially clear). Over time, the show exposes its conventional, maudlin heart through made-for-TV beats. Spader is fully washed at this late date in life, and should be commended for not fighting that. Still, he’s always dominant, remaining a few steps ahead of his friends and foes, a high T individual with a working cock, using it frequently.In other words, he remains a glorious deviant—to the bitter end.Watch It HereFlatbush local, former mayor of New York City