Netflix’s House of Cards star Paul Sparks says the popular political drama helped create the “insane” political atmosphere in which President Donald Trump’s “ridiculous behavior” has become the norm.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sparks said several cast members — many of whom are “liberal” — “had a lot of strong feelings about” the election results.
The Boardwalk Empire alum said after Trump’s election, he “woke up in the middle of night … in a panic.”
“And the first thought I had was, ‘Man, I got to get the f— off this show! This show has created this situation that we’re in. We normalized insanity,” he said. “And people are actually only interested in seeing day-after-day of ridiculous behavior.'”
“Certainly there were a lot of people who didn’t care for [President] Obama, but the majority of people who did like him like I did, I think in a way it was easy to sleep at night,” Sparks said. “I find that a lot of the decision making and things that are happening now are pretty crazy and I feel like we had a sense of that. It played out as we were shooting. We’re just a TV show.”
Sparks plays biographer Tom Yates for Kevin Spacey’s character Frank Underwood. In February 2016, Sparks suggested that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton for president.
“It’s going to be hard for me not to vote for a woman,” the actor said at a red carpet event.
The fifth season of House of Cards premiered on Netflix in May.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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