LAS VEGAS -- It was a gamble Kevin Spacey made, not at a blackjack table or roulette wheel, but at the height of his film career.

"I got to a place really at the end of 1999 when American Beauty was out and it was a very, very exciting time and I had to ask myself, 'What am I going to do?' " he tells Sun Media at the posh Red Rock Resort, Casino and Spa, about 30 minutes from the Vegas strip.

"I had been really focused on film and frankly quite driven and ambitious ... And I had to work at it because I didn't look like guys who star in movies. But then I had to decide 'Do I want to spend the next 10 years living in hotels and having this kind of lifestyle, constantly being on location without any kind of consistency?' "

So in 2003, Spacey, who won Oscars for American Beauty as well as 1995's The Usual Suspects, crossed the Atlantic to become the artistic director of London's Old Vic Theatre Company.

"I can tell you as I sit here today it was the best decision I ever made."

Not only did it mark a substantive return to his theatrical roots -- he got his start on Broadway in such productions as Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night -- but it allowed him to exercise the sort of creative control he had only dabbled with previously as a film producer and director. Perhaps not coincidentally just a short time earlier, in 2002, his Trigger Street Productions shingle launched an online initiative to attract and nurture newfound writers.

"It was an opportunity to take all the good fortune I had been given and do something really beneficial to me personally as well as something ... not just about my own ambitions and career," he explains. "Jack Lemmon, who I was fortunate enough to know and work with and had met when I was young, always had a saying that if you've done well in this business, it is your obligation to send the elevator back down. So that's what I've been trying to do. I worked for 10, 12 years, trying to carve out a career and it worked out better than I could have imagined. My thought was, 'How responsible do I want to be with that?' I suppose that has to do with why I started the website and with the amount of things I do that you would call social enterprise."

For the coming-of-age caper 21, which opens Friday, Spacey serves as both actor and producer. Based loosely on the fact-based account of card-counting M.I.T. students who made a mint at blackjack, the drama features Spacey as the professor who leads his pupils (Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth among them) in besting the Vegas casinos at their own game.

Still, even if his big-screen work isn't his chief priority, Spacey also doesn't consider himself on hiatus from Hollywood -- despite a heady schedule that finds him, after a day of interviews, flying back to London for the following evening's performance of Speed the Plow opposite Jeff Goldblum.

In addition to 21, Trigger Street is responsible for the forthcoming HBO movie Recount about the 2000 U.S. presidential election while Spacey has already shot the British ensemble piece, Telstar, written and directed by London actor Nick Moran (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). As well, he expects to reprise his role as Lex Luthor sometime in 2009 in a sequel to Superman Returns.

"The truth is, even if the Old Vic didn't exist, to do two movies a year is still a lot of movies," says the 48-year-old. "You're lucky to find two movies worth doing in the course of a year. I still want to keep one foot firmly in the film world."

Besides which, he only expects to be at the Old Vic for another five years or so.

"There's a number of things I want to accomplish before I leave. But theatre companies need new blood and a new artistic vision after a time. Usually it's about 10 years most artistic directors stay."