Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood is back on Netflix. But there’s a catch

Easter is, traditionally, the time for unexpected but welcome comebacks, and so it is not without precedent that the supposed-deceased character of Frank Underwood from Netflix’s House of Cards, played so memorably by Kevin Spacey, has popped up once again, in unusual circumstances. The comedian Tim Dillon, who is releasing a new show on Netflix, I’m Your Mother, has put out a brief promotional video in which he interacts with Underwood, at his most diabolical.

Kevin Spacey has made a surprise appearance in a skit with comedian Tim Dillon to promote Dillon’s new Netflix special. Credit: Netflix

From his opening remarks – “You podcasters think that you’ve inherited the kingdom … whispering in ears, swaying elections, spinning the truth like it was cotton candy, when in truth you’re nothing but a bunch of clowns, juggling boner pills and hair tonic” – it is clear that Underwood, and by extension Spacey, has returned with a vengeance.

The video is only a relatively short one, at two and a half minutes, but it is packed with good lines, whether scripted by Dillon, Spacey or another. There is then some suitably tongue-in-cheek menacing back-and-forth between the two, as Underwood attempts to blackmail Dillon for past indiscretions (“While at a hotel in Milwaukee in 2023, you called a Taco Bell, just to talk”) and then, when asked to plug Dillon’s Austin-filmed comedy show, the ex-president replies “Austin? I don’t care if you filmed it on Mars, with Elon Musk!”

Yet it is all in vain. Dillon turns the table on Underwood by revealing that he has not only acknowledged his past indiscretions, but positively revelled in them, putting them out into the open to entertain his audiences. (“We don’t have blackmail, we have content!“) The skit ends, as it must, with a dig at Dillon’s new home; when he says that his show is on Netflix, Underwood shakes his head and says “You foul, loathsome, evil little cockroach … but I love it.”

The existence of the sketch is one of the more surprising things to have emerged in recent years. Dillon described making it as “lots of fun”, and said on Instagram that “Netflix didn’t know we were doing it, but they’ve been super cool about it.” Referring to House of Cards, he mused “That was a really fun show that they did, and they should bring it back and redo season six.”

Tim Dillon released a skit featuring a surprise guest in a bid to promote his new comedy special on Netflix. Credit: Getty Images

Many would agree with him. Until now, Spacey has been persona non grata in Hollywood after a succession of trials and civil cases for sexual misconduct and sexual assault. Although he was acquitted in a high-profile criminal case in London in 2023, which appeared to put an end to the matter from a legal perspective, the number of allegations against the actor and director have been critically damaging to his reputation, and have meant that he has not found any mainstream work in years.

The last film of any substance that he appeared in, 2018’s Billionaire Boys Club, was released after the first unflattering stories had emerged, and flopped at the box office in consequence. Since then, he has appeared in low-budget British and American films that nobody but the most committed of his admirers would have sought out. The likes of Control, Peter Five Eight and the forthcoming The Contract (in which, ironically enough, he plays Satan) are not going to trouble your local Odeon, or, indeed, your Netflix account.

The fact that Spacey has reprised his Underwood role with the tacit approval of Netflix is somewhat unexpected, given his extremely complex relationship with the streamer. When the first series of House of Cards was broadcast in 2013, it was event television – starring as it did the double Oscar winner opposite Robin Wright as his wife Claire, and being executive produced by Spacey’s former Seven director David Fincher – and all the more notable for being one of the first original scripted dramas that was broadcast on the platform.

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright star as Frank Underwood, an amoral politician and Democrat from South Carolina’s 5th congressional district, and his equally ambitious wife Claire Underwood, in House of Cards. Credit: Netflix

Had it flopped, it is unlikely that there would have been the plethora of shows that followed (so no Adolescence, no Crown, no Stranger Things) but its Emmy-winning, critically lauded success seemed to suggest that Spacey, and his signature menacing delivery, was one of the biggest draws on television. It changed the face of streaming drama with A-list lead actors, an Oscar-nominated director and big-budget production, paying the way for everything that came subsequently. Spacey won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Underwood, and under normal circumstances, it would have remained his signature role, to be reprised whenever a new series was called for.

This did not come to pass. The streamer was not only aghast at the allegations against Spacey, but announced in 2017 that “Netflix will not be involved with any further production of House of Cards that includes Kevin Spacey.” The production company MRC sued Spacey for $US31 million for breach of contract – a sum that was later reduced to $US1 million after several appeals – and cobbled together a final, underwhelming sixth season that saw Claire Underwood become President after her husband’s off-screen death. It received mixed reviews, all of which concurred that, without its Machiavellian lead, the show was not the same dynamic force that it had been before.

Spacey, meanwhile, seemed unwilling to say goodbye to Frank Underwood. He had a brief and bizarre phase of releasing annual YouTube videos of himself in character as Underwood every Christmas Eve, entitled “Let Me Be Frank”, in which he denied the allegations against him, threatened vengeance against his tormentors and, perhaps most strangely of all, offered the number of a suicide hotline for anyone who had been adversely affected by COVID.

Once his legal issues were resolved, Spacey returned as Underwood for a longer, in-character conversation with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson on Christmas Eve 2023, in which he directly addressed the audience in a plea to allow him to run for the presidency, all over again.

Amusingly, Spacey-as-Underwood not only claimed to have invented Netflix’s signature “tudum” sound, but said, blurring the lines between character and performer, “It is bizarre they decided to publicly cut ties with me on allegations alone, allegations that have now been proven false. Because I don’t think there’s any question. Netflix exists because of me. I put them on the map and they tried to put me in the ground.”

He may have a point, but the actor may find that his only high-profile work these days comes when he reprises his Underwood role. And Spacey will surely be hoping that rapidly changing social and political stances in Hollywood will be playing into his hands. At the peak of his fame and success, Spacey was a well-known Democrat supporter who was often seen in the company of his friend President Clinton, and who lost no opportunity to mock Donald Trump.

In 2016, while presenting a charity auction at Cannes, he joked: “Foreign films contain two things Donald Trump hates the most: foreigners and reading” and had remarked the previous year to chat show host Stephen Colbert that he had a very specific imagined confidante for his character’s monologues: “When I’m looking directly into that camera I’m talking to one person and one person only and that is … Donald Trump.”

Yet now, with a new ethos in America – with Netflix boss Ted Sarandos just one of the many figures in the entertainment industry who is keen to curry favour with the president, rather than to scorn him – Spacey appears to have taken a different tack. Not only are Dillon and Carlson both conservative or, at the very least, Right-leaning libertarian figures, but Spacey’s friendship with Trump’s current favourite commentator, the British writer Douglas Murray, saw him appear at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre in October 2023.

Murray gave a talk on the iniquities of cancel culture, in memory of the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, before Spacey delivered a speech from Timon of Athens, which was greeted with a standing ovation. Murray pointedly observed afterwards that the speech was about what “happens when a society drops a person for no reason”.

There are many who would welcome a Spacey comeback. Last year, this newspaper’s columnist Allison Pearson interviewed him, around the same time that a Channel 4 documentary, Spacey Unmasked, made further allegations against him, which have remained unresolved. Several well-known figures from the entertainment industry, including Stephen Fry, Liam Neeson and the director Trevor Nunn, suggested that the time had come for the actor to be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold.

As Fry said: “There is not the faintest chance that he will so much as tap a stranger on the shoulder in future. I am pretty sure most people have got the measure of his past behaviour, but very, very few believe he should be continually pilloried and jeered. Unless I’m missing something, I think he has paid the price.”

Humane and thoughtful words, but, as yet, nobody in Hollywood appears to be listening. Spacey – a notably intelligent and thoughtful man, as well as a wickedly funny and talented mimic – is still a much-invited guest in both London and the United States, where he has a considerable number of friends in private life. But paid work appears to be impossible to come by.

Just after his acquittal, I was, by chance, sat next to him and Nunn in a London restaurant, where the conversation was of potential roles (including, naturally, Timon) that Spacey might perform at a British theatre. He seemed genuinely excited at the prospect, and any London or repertory stage would be lucky to have the actor in a great classical role.

Comebacks do happen. Mel Gibson, who appeared to have torpedoed his career not once but twice, returned with the Oscar-winning Second World War masterpiece Hacksaw Ridge, and has continued to act prolifically and to direct, most recently with the Mark Wahlberg airborne thriller Flight Risk. Johnny Depp, who seemed to have been exiled to obscure independent cinema, is filming his first Hollywood picture in years, Snow White director Marc Webb’s Day Drinker.

The actor may not be whistling while he works, but it still suggests that he has been forgiven by the industry after one of the nastier, mud-slinging legal battles in living memory. Even Armie Hammer, who was accused of cannibalism, of all things, has resumed an acting career, although Uwe Boll-directed B-movies entitled things like Citizen Vigilante are a far cry from his Oscar-winning pictures such as The Social Network and Call Me By Your Name. But all these people, once pariahs, are back in work again: an indulgence that has not yet been offered to Spacey.

Perhaps the appearance in the Dillon video is simply a one-off and that is all his latter-day career will be; self-parodying brief appearances reprising his most famous role, Or maybe a brave and daring filmmaker with clout – Fincher is the obvious one, but the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson or Greta Gerwig are equally possible – will insist on casting him in their latest picture, and the studio, curious to see whether the actor is still toxic or whether he has been forgiven by the wider public, will acquiesce.

While few would argue – and Spacey himself would concur – that his off-screen and off-stage behaviour was not perfect, he has undergone considerable punishment for his behaviour. But even fewer would argue that a true return for Frank Underwood would be the TV event of the decade. There might be one more twist yet to come in this particular saga.

The Telegraph

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