For a year and a half, actress Kate Mara has not been able to speak to anyone about a major development with her "House of Cards" character. Now that Netflix has released the second season, the 31-year-old actress is starting to talk. (If you have not watched the first episode of the second season of Netflix's "House of Cards," you will want to stop reading now.)
In an appearance on "Late Show With David Letterman" on Tuesday night, Mara teased Letterman with what happened to her diligent journalist character, Zoe Barnes.
But in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published Wednesday, she got down to the dirty details of the second season premiere. (This is your last chance to stop reading before the spoiler drops.)
After meeting her ex-lover/secret source Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) for a rendezvous in a subway station, she insisted on grilling him about whether he murdered Peter Russo (Corey Stoll). Frank made her delete his texts and his contact information from her phone, then tossed her into the path of an oncoming train.
For viewers who saw the British show on which the series is based, Zoe's death didn't come as a surprise. But Mara told Entertainment Weekly she was impressed by both the manner in which executive producers chose to have her character die and the timing of it.
"The reason I was so excited to be a part of it — and I wasn’t bummed about it — was because I thought it was such a ballsy move to do it on the very first episode of the second season, and not do it halfway through, or (in) the last episode of the second season. It’s a pretty shocking way to start season two."
She called the filming of the scene "surreal."
"We were shooting in a real subway in Baltimore," she said. "I guess we only had one night to shoot, and then we had another full day in our studios in Baltimore, with a green screen and all that. We shot the stunt there. But we also had some additional shooting in the soundstage, and then also in the subway again. Because we had a lot of extras and stuff, we had to sort of be really sneaky about the whole thing."
After everything that has transpired and everything Zoe suspected, Mara said that she thinks Zoe agreed to meet Frank because she still trusted him "a tiny bit."
"Of course there’s a little bit of trust left, for sure," she said. "Not very much. But that small amount of trust mixed with her desire to get the truth and to feel morally OK, that small amount of trust is enough for her to do it and to take that risk."
Even after Frank killed Zoe and left Mara out of a job, the actress said she's still rooting for Frank to win.
"One of the things I love about the show is that you root for this evil guy," she said. "I do, anyway. I don’t want him to get found out. I mean, I’m not watching the show for moral reasons. It’s entertaining, and there doesn’t have to be a good guy for me to like it."
Read the rest of the interview on EW.com.