DANIEL D’ADDARIO
Salon
FEB 14, 2014

“The way it was displayed to us, long before Episode 1 was ever written in Season 1, was you are Lady Macbeth to his Richard III.”

That was “House of Cards” star Robin Wright, using English-major references to describe her TV series — and her relationship, therein, to the Kevin Spacey character — at a recent roundtable discussion with journalists. These sort of comparisons are as old as the “Cards” franchise itself, which began its life as a British TV series later adapted for Netflix. Spacey, who played Richard III in 2011 and 2012, has asserted that the show’s central device (not original to the American version) was a direct crib from Shakespeare’s play.

Molly Parker, who plays a newly introduced member of Congress in the second season, said at the roundtable that “my sense is that this show’s sort of Shakespearean in its scope and has that sort of ‘Richard III’ — those themes in ‘Macbeth,’ even.”

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