Author: Jackie Strause / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Claire Underwood assumes ownership of a House of Cards trademark in the final season.
The new president Underwood — and the first female POTUS in the world of the Netflix political thriller — is trying her hand at many tasks when she enters the Oval Office in the sixth season (which releases all eight episodes on Friday).
And one of those challenges will be refining her relationship with the audience.The last five seasons of House of Cards set up a thorny marriage between viewers and former starring character Frank Underwood (played by Kevin Spacey). Utilizing the staple storytelling device of the Beau Willimon-created drama, Frank constantly broke the fourth wall to speak privately to viewers. His direct-to-camera monologues, quips and rants were an attempt by Frank to gain the trust of a skeptical audience — and make himself feel better about his lying, manipulation and deadly deeds in the process. Claire, meanwhile, ignored the audience, allowing the trope to be reserved for Frank.
That is, until now.
“We just decided, wouldn’t it be great if Claire was brutally honest and she shared her vulnerability and her insecurities — and her lies — with the audience?” Wright tells The Hollywood Reporter of the final season.
The first hint that Claire would break the fourth wall came at the tail end of season four, with the she flashed to the camera. The fifth season made good on that promise in its premiere when Claire proclaimed: “Just to be clear, it’s not that I haven’t always known you were there. It’s that I have mixed feelings about you. I question your intentions. And I’m ambivalent about attention. But don’t take it personally. It’s how I feel about most everybody.” But her series-defining moment came at the very end of the fifth-season finale when, after taking the power from her counterpart and husband to become president, she spoke the final two words of the season to the audience: “My turn.”
The fifth season bowed in May 2017. When Claire Underwood proclaimed that House of Cards shift on-camera, it was nearly six months before Spacey would be fired from the series over sexual assault allegations at the height of the #MeToo movement. “We had a lot of conversations about season five and we ended up with ‘My turn,'” Frank Pugliese, showrunner along with Melissa James Gibson, recently told THR. “And it felt like it was maybe indicative of something that was in the…
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