⭐8.7
Description: Majority House Whip Francis Underwood takes you on a long journey as he exacts his vengeance on those he feels wronged him – that is, his own cabinet members including the President of the United States himself. Dashing, cunning, methodical and vicious, Frank Underwood along with his equally manipulative yet ambiguous wife, Claire, take Washington by storm through climbing the hierarchical ladder to power in this Americanized recreation of the BBC series of the same name.
Creator: Beau Willimon
Stars: Kevin Spacey, Michel Gill, Robin Wright
Trivia
- Michel Gill (President Walker) and Jayne Atkinson (Catherine Durant) are married in real life.
- In season 3, Doug Stamper’s (Michael Kelly) niece and nephew are played by his real-life children, Frankie and Clinton.
- The first two seasons together cost $100 million to produce.
- Production was based in a 300,000+ sq. ft. warehouse in the fashion industrial district in Joppa, Maryland. The set is actually part of an older Macy’s distribution center, and all the driving scenes were performed in a green screen room, which served as a refrigerator for fur coats. Inside the building the following sets can be found: Oval Office, the Underwood home (upper lower and main levels), House of Representatives, various state representative’s offices, South Carolina governor’s office, various plush hotel suites.
- Director David Fincher stated that every main cast member was their first choice. In the first read through, he said “I want everybody here to know that you represent our first choice – each actor here represents our first choice for these characters. So do not fuck this up.”
- During an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Kevin Spacey was asked, “What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?” His answer was, “Politics.”
- Season 3 was accidentally released to Netflix two weeks before the official release. It was taken down around 17 minutes later.
- Production of this original Netflix series is quite unique for the extraordinary creative freedom permitted filmmakers to write/direct/produce without undue supervision or second-guessing, major factor that drew Oscar nominees like David Fincher to the project.
- The first teaser trailer for season four premiered during the Republican Party debate in 2016, on CNN which featured a mock Presidential campaign advertisement.
- The sound that Frank’s ring makes when he bangs his fist against the desk at the very end of the Season 2 Finale is part of the small musical sound effect that now plays during the Netflix logo in front all of their Original Series, Films, and Specials.
- Michael Kelly auditioned for several roles (including Tom Hammerschmidt, Lucas Goodwin and Peter Russo). He didn’t get any of these, but afterwards he was offered another role, Doug Stamper.
- Each of the first five season has 13 episodes – one episode per card in a suit of playing cards.
- Netflix won a bidding war between television networks to produce the show because they committed to release two seasons directly.
- David Fincher offered the role of Claire Underwood directly to Robin Wright, with whom he had just worked on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). He convinced her by promising she would have input in the creation of the character.
- The first democratic whip was appointed in 1889 and named Oscar Wilder Underwood.
- The series is an adaptation of the original BBC drama series House of Cards (1990), itself based on the novel by Michael Dobbs, who was a Chief of Staff and Deputy Chairman of the British Conservative Party under Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major.
- In 2015, Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich launched his campaign to become Missouri’s Republican gubernatorial candidate with a speech exposing what he characterized as corruption among the state’s Republican Party establishment. That establishment responded with a subtle and not-so-subtle smear campaign against Schweich; tactics included spreading the (incorrect) rumor that Schweich was Jewish and airing an advertisement in the style of “House of Cards,” complete with narration by a southern-accented Kevin Spacey sound-alike that smeared Schweich’s character, called him “a weak candidate for governor,” and sneered that “he could be easily confused for the deputy sheriff of Mayberry.” Not long after this smear campaign started, Schweich committed suicide by self-inflicted gunshot. After Schweich’s suicide, his campaign’s media director, Robert “Spence” Jackson, again denounced the corruption in the state Republican Party that he said was partly to blame for Schweich’s death; about a month after that, Jackson also committed suicide.
- In May 2015, the Kansas City Star reported that Missouri House Speaker John Diehl, a 49-year-old conservative Republican with a wife and three sons who ran on a platform of “family values,” had been engaging in an exchange of sexually explicit text messages with a House intern who was a college freshman. Various sources also reported that the intern saved Diehl’s number in her phone’s contact list under the name “Frank Underwood.”
- Robin Wright revealed on a recent interview (May 2016) that when she found out she was getting paid less than Kevin Spacey, she somewhat channelized her character of Claire and threatened the producers of going public with the salary injustice if they didn’t fix it.
- Robin Wright is the only cast member to appear in every episode.
- In February 2016, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., started displaying a painting of Kevin Spacey by the British artist Jonathan Yeo. Although the NPG often exhibits portraits of actors (among other prominent Americans), the gallery is also well-known for its portraits of the U.S. presidents and bills itself as “the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.” In that vein, several sources (including Vulture and the official twitter feeds for both the TV show House of Cards and the National Portrait Gallery) reported on this new portrait as though it were actually a painting of President Frank Underwood instead of the actor who portrays him.
- Netflix lost an estimated $39 million after cutting ties with lead Kevin Spacey after numerous young men alleged they had been sexually assaulted by him. A scheduled production of the biopic Gore about Gore Vidal was abandoned with Spacey playing the author.