Emmy Nominees: Kevin Spacey of ‘House of Cards’

Jemal Countess/Getty Images Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey, a star and an executive producer of the Netflix political thriller “House of Cards,” was nominated on Thursday for an Emmy Awards for lead actor in a drama series for his role as the scheming politician Francis (Frank) Underwood. “House of Cards” received nine nominations in total, including outstanding drama series, the first such nomination for a Netflix show. Here in excerpts from the conversation, Mr. Spacey talks about the series and the pleasures of being the underhanded Underwood.

Q.

Should I address you as Mr. Congressman, or â€"

A.

I think just Kevin this morning would be fine. It’s a beautiful day in Baltimore.

Q.

We’ve seen this morning how everything turned out for Netflix and for “House of Cards,” but were you at all uneasy or uncertain about taking this show to a service that, in the moment, was an unknown quantity?

A.

Not really, because I’d really been paying attention over the last, let’s just say, decade to what’s been happening in terms of the fertile ground that television was offering to storytellers and to directors and to writers, and seeing there had been a shift, deliberate or accidental, in the motion-picture industry to do less films that were driven by character, and might appeal to the mind as opposed to the pulse. It made sense that you saw that migration of artists.

You then are watching all these companies that started to do incredibly well, providing the portal for content. It seemed to me that somewhere along the way, one of these companies was going to step up and say, “Let’s get into the content business.” When we went out to all the regular networks and cable networks, Netflix, it turns out, was the only network that looked us in the eyes and said, “We don’t need you to do a pilot. We believe in it.” Every other network wanted us to do a pilot, and David Fincher and Beau Willimon, our head writer, we realized we were asking for something unusual, but we didn’t want to to feel that obligation, to have to do a pilot and establish all the characters and create some arbitrary cliffhangers to prove that the series was worthy of an order. Look, we were lucky that they looked at our track records and the original series and said, “Well, go ahead. How many do you want to do?”

Q.

Was it exciting to be an observer in the world, as you see people consuming the show â€" not just once a week but the whole thing in a weekend?

A.

That didn’t change the creative process, because the camera doesn’t know it’s a streaming camera, any more than it’s a TV camera or a film camera. But it did affect the way we were able to create the series, and that was very exciting. We may have been the first original series that was premiered that way, but we’re certainly not the first series that’s been consumed that way. If you’ve been talking to anybody over the last year or more â€" “What did you do over the weekend?” “I stayed home and watched two seasons of ‘Breaking Bad,’ I watched four seasons of ‘Mad Men’” â€" that just seems to be the way people are watching and enjoying lengthy, complicated plot lines and characterizations. It made sense to me â€" audiences have been saying, “We want the freedom.” In some ways, Netflix and all of us have maybe learned the lesson the music industry didn’t learn.

Q.

As Underwood, even in the first season, you’ve gotten to do some of the most evil and underhanded things imaginable. Where can he go in Season 2?

A.

Well, you know, that’s politics, baby. [laughs] I think it’s been part of the appeal of the show â€" audiences have always been interested in Washington as a storytelling genre, and maybe at the time that we have a very deadlocked government, it’s nice for an audience to watch even a diabolical politician be very effective. It must be a fiction, right?