Cards star’s flush season

“Would it be too many cuts, to go back to Kevin’s face one more time?” the director asked. That would be fine, the editor said. Satisfied, the director spun in her chair, ready for a break.

The director of the episode is, in fact, Wright. On camera since she was a teenager, she is for the first time calling the shots. Two nights later, she would accept the Golden Globe for best actress in a dramatic series, a shimmering silver gown draped over her lithe, elegant frame, her classic features beaming in surprise. But in the editing suite, she was barefoot in jeans, with glasses under a newsboy’s cap.

The dazzling looks that first surfaced in the soap opera Santa Barbara and then were on wide display in The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump (1994), She’s So Lovely (1997) and Unbreakable (2000) were tough to spot.

Wright, 47, is a bit of a legend for passing on dozens of lucrative roles — in Batman Forever for example — and for fleeing the spotlight. As an actress, mother, wife — she was married to Sean Penn — she has lived a life of remove, with a reputation for reticence that some read as imperiousness.

Wright was clearly in a very good mood. She is in love, newly engaged to the actor Ben Foster (Lone Survivor). She is happy to be in the middle of House of Card’s grand tale of political intrigue, and animated by working on the other side of the camera. “It feels like a second coming,” she said. “I didn’t work a lot because I wanted to raise my kids. I have no regret about that. But this is a very different chapter.”

At the end of the first season, when Spacey mentioned he might direct in the second season, she was surprised. “I said, ‘I want to, too’,” she said. “As an actor, I had noticed very vividly that very few directors know how to direct actors. I’m not at all sure I know what I am doing, but I know what brings good work out of actors.”

She is eager to direct more, is working on a screenplay with Foster, and, given her performance in House of Cards, is very much back in the mix as an actress. The Globe will add luster, as will her role in A Most Wanted Man, with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

“She literally turned her back on the business, raised her family and didn’t chase roles,” Fincher said. “When I worked with her on Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, she was there, extremely present. We already had Kevin Spacey in mind, and we needed a formidable Lady Macbeth. I have always been gobsmacked by her. Let’s just say it involved a lot of grovelling.”

Part of what convinced him that the animated, impish Wright could play the imperious, inscrutable Claire Underwood was some flashes he saw on the set.

“She is so charming, but she can be utterly withering if she thinks the people around her are not being serious,” he said.

Eric Roth, a writer-producer on House of Cards, watched her play Jenny, the lifelong love of the title character in Forrest Gump, a movie he wrote. He said that her on-screen alchemy is rare. “There is the broken angel part of her,” he said, “but there is also something fundamentally unattainable about her. There is a distancing quality she uses to very good effect.”

Her children are now grown, but as Wright’s profile rises, don’t look for her on a lot of red carpets. “I don’t get the awards ceremony theory, or rather I don’t understand the religion of it,” she said. “There’s a gratitude in hearing my name, but I don’t understand anybody deciding what is good and not good work.”