With its complex characters, Netflix’s political drama House of Cards made waves when it debuted on February 1, 2013. Kevin Spacey, who portrayed a vicious Democratic leader named Frank Underwood on screen, once drew parallels between former president Donald Trump and his fictional persona. While appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017 he said, “At some point between when we’ve shot the season and before it drops there are three or four or five things that we have dealt with on the show happen that end up happening in the real world.” He added, “I have to say in all honesty, I think we’ve never been more relevant. I do believe we have better writers. I have to say, it’s been very entertaining.”
Spacey stated further, “And we go, everyone’s going to assume that we stole it from the headlines but in fact, we did it first.” As per The Daily Mail , co-star Robin Wright who played Spacey’s wife, Claire Underwood, in the drama expressed the same views while appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show , “Trump is trumping us. I think we’re running out of ideas at this point. He’s stolen them all,” she said. “It’s a frighteningly good show and frightening because it’s, from what I hear, pretty accurate,” Ellen pointed out. “It is so accurate that I asked a politician once, “Well how accurate is it?” and he said, “Oh, about 99 percent,”‘ Robin revealed. “I was thinking well that one percent would be the poisoning of a person or murdering someone and he goes,’ no the one percent that’s kind of off is that you would never get an education bill passed that fast,” she added.
According to The Hollywood Reporter , Spacey’s on-screen character was loosely based on former president Bill Clinton, however, the show’s writer, Beau Willimon, purposefully made Underwood a South Carolina native to set his accent apart from Clinton’s, who is from Arkansas. “We felt very strongly we did not want people to think that’s what we were up to,” Spacey said. “That was never our intention to play into the real world of politics . We wanted to be an alternative universe. And it may be a universe that some people prefer.”
Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos further stated that things happening in the real political scenarios were purely coincidental, “It’s almost crystal ball-ish. Some of the storylines are obviously developing well before they’re happening in the headlines and it just tells you how fluid the market is. And the world is not expecting anything but absurd yet it’s totally grounded.” Spacey added, “We never really worry about keeping it topical and current. It’s never something that crosses our minds. We just try to remain true to what we’re trying to do. One of the most important aspects for me is to just not go where people think we’re going. To continually have the show go down different paths and open up different doors and not end up being predictable.”