5 things you didn’t know about House of Cards

Netflix’s House of Cards is a reboot of a 1990 British series, but in the original show, Francis Underwood’s wife was only a minor character. The intention in beefing up Claire for the American version was “to manufacture a woman who was the best of both sexes,” says Robin Wright. “Men and women have different types of stamina, right? Of mind and heart. Claire has both sides. She can be sensitive, compassionate, dogged [and] emotion-free, if necessary.” In short, a Machiavellian superwoman. Who says we lack for female role models?

The producers of House of Cards discussed how to end the show as early as Season 1. So, what was the original plan? “Truthfully, it was the most obvious,” says Wright. “[Claire] would be Lady Macbeth and kill [Francis] for power.” Not exactly a happy ending, then. But even before Kevin Spacey left the show, at the end of Season 5, that storyline was ditched. Why? “Because that’s what everybody would expect. We were trying to get out of the box of what everyone would expect.”

Other possible conclusions to Claire’s story included “killing her”, according to Wright. “I think there was [also] talk about her marrying a black man and having his child. There were a number of things…” she adds, mysteriously.

“I always wanted [Claire] to win the Presidency,” Wrights admits. That’s win it, as opposed to inherit it on a technicality, as she does when Frances resigns and she steps in as Vice President at the end of Season 5. “Literally [I wanted to] have her be the best president we’ve ever had. And the most corrupt,” she adds. “You can’t be the best without being corrupt – there’s just no way.” An utterance truly in the spirit of the show.

A notoriously exacting director known for pushing his actors through multiple takes, David Fincher, who co-developed the series for Netflix, was particularly demanding on Wright in the scenes they worked on together. As Wright tells it: “He would feed direction. He didn’t just give you a word. He didn’t just say ‘make it happier’, ‘make it sadder’, ‘make it more exciting’. He’d say, ‘Say the line like you wanna kill your mother’, ‘Say the line like you wanna f**k your husband’. But with every other actor, he would cut and then go again from that very specific note. With me, he would just fire stuff off one after the other while the camera was still rolling. I asked him, ‘Why do you keep rolling on me?’ And he said, ‘Because I am getting you out of your f***ing head.’ And he was right.” The moral of the story? Fincher knows best.

House of Cards Season 6 streams on Netflix on November 2

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