10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About House Of Cards

2. There's A Lot Of Real Politics In It

In fact you'd be surprised quite how accurate a lot of the politics in House Of Cards is. Again, hopefully not so much the dog strangling business €“ or the murders staged to look like suicides €“ or pushing people in front of subway trains €“ but a lot of the other stuff is apparently rooted in reality. Including the call girl stuff. That's real ripped-from-the-headlines sort of stuff. The original House Of Cards books, which the British series faithfully adapted, were written by former Conservative MP speechwriter Michael Dobbs. Just as those books claimed to have some insight into the workings of the Houses Of Parliament, so too can the American House Of Cards claim to have the inside track of the White House. Why? Because creator, writer and showrunner Beau Willimon has worked in politics too, in a very similar capacity to Dobbs: between 1998 and 2004 he worked on various Democratic campaigns, which later inspired his first big hit, the movie The Ides Of March which was adapted from a play of his. Which also didn't cast the world of American politics in a particularly good light, which suggests that Willimon was party to some of the darker sides of the whole shebang.