Thought House of Cards was dark? The villain arc you didn’t see was darker
Cody Fern says his House of Cards character was rewritten after Kevin Spacey’s exit — and the darker version you were meant to see never reached screen.
File this one under 'odd twists you never see coming'. Turns out, Cody Fern was meant to be the big bad in House of Cards season six—until the entire plot, and half the show, blew up after Netflix sacked Kevin Spacey. If you ever thought Fern's character felt like a watered-down afterthought, you are entirely correct. Let me pull apart just how dramatically his ride was rerouted behind the scenes.
Original Plan vs What Actually Happened
Right, so Fern landed the role in 2017, and it wasn't just any minor part. He was going to play the season's main villain, openly described as 'a Jared Kushner type', someone properly intertwined with Spacey's Frank Underwood at the top of the US political food chain. The writers were clearly gearing up for a proper face-off. Crews had been filming for months with this entire villain arc front and centre—then the whole production got thrown into chaos after a scandal yanked Spacey (and Frank Underwood) out of existence overnight.
Production on House of Cards was shut down for two months after Netflix dropped Kevin Spacey in November 2017.
Fern himself summed it up rather dryly to Entertainment Weekly: filming was in full swing 'and then the nuclear bomb hit'. That's when everything ground to a halt, with the future of both the series and Fern's character suddenly up for grabs. The writers had no choice but to kill Frank offscreen—heart attack, not exactly subtle—and hoist Robin Wright's Claire Underwood into the top job. Filming resumed in January 2018, but everything built around Fern's baddie basically evaporated.
Who Duncan Shepherd Became
So, what was left of his much-hyped character? Fern did return, but in a role so diminished he eventually described Duncan Shepherd as 'a wonderful wallflower'. There are distinct shades of the original Kushner inspiration: Duncan's the posh son of high-rolling operator Annette Shepherd (played by Diane Lane), and the Shepherds are a not-so-subtle stand-in for the Koch brothers—rich, powerful, shadowy influence pushers. With Annette and her brother Bill (that's Greg Kinnear) scheming behind the scenes, Fern's Duncan joins the bid to undermine President Claire Underwood, but never really drives it.
The lion's share of villainy was drained out during that mid-production scramble, and by Fern's own account, his character lost any real teeth. When EW caught up with him—at the Toronto International Film Festival, where he was out plugging his filmmaker debut, Closing Night—Fern seemed bemused by the whole rollercoaster, hinting that he's now got a handful of stories too spicy for print. In an earlier 2018 interview, he called joining House of Cards 'thrilling', and had to set the record straight on tabloid rumours: Duncan was never meant to be Frank Underwood's lover, just an ambitious political animal in his own right.