TV

The real-life White House ‘affair’ of ‘House of Cards’

Getting a job on “House of Cards” was a family affair for actor Michael Gill, who plays President Garrett Walker on the Netflix series. No sooner had he been called in for an audition to play Kevin Spacey’s foil than his wife, actress Jayne Atkinson, wanted in on the action.

The political thriller has a plethora of Capitol Hill denizens so she went into read for the role of Catherine Durant, who is now secretary of state. And Gill, 53, went back into read for the role of a senator. Neither knew, at first, the project’s title, and Spacey as well as fellow executive producers Beau Willimon and David Fincher were not present.

“I had four auditions. All on tape. Never met Kevin, never met David [Fincher]. We both got it within four or five days of each other,” says Gill, “And then towards the end [of the audition process], they realized we were married. When we got to set none of the cast knew we were married.”

Atkinson is a more than a familiar face to television audiences. Dramas involving politics, espionage and crime are lately her stock-in-trade; she played FBI agent Karen Hayes on “24” and a long-term recurring role as BAU section chief Erin Strauss on CBS’s seamy procedural “Criminal Minds.” Gill is an unknown. He has never starred, co-starred or had a recurring role in a series.

His Juilliard classmates — Thomas Gibson (“Criminal Minds”), Bradley Whitford (“Trophy Wife”) and Wendell Pierce (“Treme”) — have their own shows, but until now Gill has mostly been content with life as a theater actor. While some might say playing the president to Spacey’s Frank Underwood is a thankless role, as the character almost never seems to know Frank is stealing his job with the (not always believable) greatest of ease, Gill is nothing but grateful. Thanks to Spacey and company, he walks into Whole Foods now and strangers call him Mr. President.

“They’ve changed my life,” Gill says. “Every now and then I feel like writing a little e-mail to David, Bo and Kevin, saying, ‘Thank you.’ Everything that’s happening, whether I get a job or not, it’s changed the way that I look at this business, the way I work, the way I prepare. It’s been a really, really great ride.”

With his sparse credits, Gill had to ask Spacey why he was cast. “He said, ‘First of all, I wanted somebody who was not known.’ I was banking on that cause every star was looking for the role. He didn’t want a star. Everyone looks at [the show] and says, ‘So, that’s our star playing the president.’ How do you draw that line and make it slightly mysterious and realistic and totally unknown?”

With several New York theater actors, including Larry Pine and Elizabeth Marvel, in the cast, Gill’s background gave him the inside track. “That was great for me,” he says.

This week, Gill appears as diplomat on CBS’s “Person of Interest,” where his fluency in French helped him get the role. The actor, who lives with Atkinson and their teenage son, Jeremy, in the Berkshires, knows several languages. He was born and grew up in New York but also lived in Switzerland, where he studied several languages as a matter of course.

His mother, Nadine, was born in Paris and his late father, Vladimir, on a Russian consulate in Hamburg, Germany; both escaped the Nazis in the early 1940s for New York. If there was one philosophy Gill and his three sisters learned at home, it was to remain under the radar.

Husband and wife, actors Michel Gill and Jayne Atkinson, arrive at a screening celebrating the second season of “House of Cards.”WireImage

“My parents escaped Nazi-occupied France. They wanted to disappear,” he says. “They wanted to make sure that we as children remained invisible. Because the Fourth Reich was coming.” Gill laughs unexpectedly, but back then his parents. “If they could help us survive and not get us killed, then they got their job done.”

An unusual dichotomy developed. Gill’s desire to be noticed, by acting, and then escape notice, by appearing in regional theater productions, shaped his life for several decades after he graduated from drama school in 1985. “I was very guarded because of how I was brought up,” he says. “I thought it was wrong in some fashion to be out there. I could keep a totally low profile, go work at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. Or work in Maine and Portland, Ore.”

But the real drama in his life was taking place off stage. Gill met Atkinson at a production of “The Heiress” at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and he says, somewhat solemnly, “We very quickly had a connection that we could not act upon at the time,” he says. Atkinson was dating someone else, but the connection between her and Gill remained strong when they met again a year later at a production of “As You Like It” at the Old Globe in San Diego. “We fell deeply in love,” he says.

There were more complications. Atkinson was still entangled and Gill was seeing someone else also.

“We couldn’t really do anything about it because we were involved with other people, but we knew we had to deal with it,” he says.

It may seem unusual to hear that an actor was able to use impulse control, but Gill is mindful of how the business wrecks many marriages. “The profession will do everything to break up [a relationship] because this business is based on sex,” he says. “Relationships are fragile to begin with. This business just finds a way of interfering. You are separated for periods of time. It’s mentally impossible for two people to carry on in a relationship if you’re separated.”

They started dating in 1992 and have been married for 15 years. They have handled the separations that come with the territory by picking up and moving, as Gill did when his wife was working in California in “24.”

“Jayne and I take not one moment for granted. The minute we sit back and think, ‘Today I don’t have to do any work. I don’t have to cherish you, I don’t have to tell you I love you.’ If one day goes by, then you’re not there. You’re not present. It’s work.”

The benefits include, among other things, spending two seasons “facing each other in cabinet meetings on ‘House of Cards.’ So it’s been quite a journey.”

With Season 3 of the show still in the script-writing phase, Gill doesn’t know what his future role in the show will be. But he can look forward to Frank’s downfall, no matter how long it takes. “I think it’s fascinating to watch these guys rise to the top of what takes them down. They’re their worst enemies,” he says. “And how really impotent is at that level. There’s gonna have to be this continued rise to power and hubris till suddenly the engines give out. And he comes crashing down. And that’s going to be a beautiful sight to it.”

As for the most shocking thing he’s seen in his two seasons on the show, that’s easy: the threesome between Claire, Frank and his bodyguard Meecham (Nathan Darrow).

“Of course I saw it coming, but how was it going to happen? You just watched the seduction going on,” he says. “When I read it on the page, I thought, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’ve got to take a shower.’ And now all I can say is, ‘Why wasn’t I invited?’”