time Murray hits a winner -- and groaning each time he doesn't. He microanalyzes Murray's game as though it were a character he was considering playing.

Before the match is over, Spacey has one of his two coaches, Keith, who used to hit with Murray, push back his flight to Miami so that the two can squeeze in more practice. "Kevin doesn't half-ass anything," his producing partner Dana Brunetti will tell me later. "Once he gets into something -- working out, learning to play a musical instrument -- he goes into it full bore. So, he's always been a fan of tennis, but lately it's become an obsession."

At 54, Spacey is in his prime, eagerly pursuing new obsessions and exalting in his contradictory status in Hollywood as a big-nameturn into someone else, without warning. "You know," he begins, as we turn into the tennis center, "when I was on the air, 'streaming was something we did when we pulled the car over to take a leak on the side of the road." Well, hello there, Johnny Carson.

Later, there's an unmistakable impression of President Clinton, an old friend with whom Spacey used to play cards, and then a second stab at Carson. His House of Cards castmates have heard him do others, including Al Pacino, William Hurt and, his personal hero and three-time co-star, Jack Lemmon. "In between takes sometimes, he'll fall into one of his uncanny mimicries and improv some hysterical shtick," says co-star Robin Wright. Showrunner Beau Willimon says he's "been tempted more than once