LOS ANGELES — At a production house here last month, a director and editor worked on an episode of the second season of Netflix’s “House of Cards.” In the darkened room, they toggled back and forth over a scene in which Representative Francis Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, and his wife, Claire, played by Robin Wright, are in their bedroom with a laptop, looking at clips from his political career and talking about the road they have chosen.
“House of Cards” is about many things — the absolutes of power, the contagious nature of scandal, how politics are personal — but it is fundamentally about a marriage. It is an unusual one, a business partnership between intimate accomplices.
In this scene, the Underwoods are bathed in warm indirect light that is a trademark of the series, conceived by the film director David Fincher (“The Social Network”) as Netflix’s first big entry in dramatic television. They are having a moment about how far they have come.
“Would it be too many cuts, to go back to Kevin’s face one more time?” the director asked. The actor is, after all, looking at Ms. Wright, whose face invites staring. That would be fine, the editor said. Satisfied, the director spun in her chair and said she was ready for a break.
The director of the tenth episode of the second season is, in fact, Ms. Wright. On camera since she was a teenager, she is for the first time calling the shots, and is deeply engaged by every aspect of the opportunity. 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 during her aw-shucks acceptance speech. 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” were tough to spot. She looked like a beautiful teenage boy, not the movie star whose unalloyed beauty tended to drain people of superlatives when she appeared in “Forrest Gump” (1994), “She’s So Lovely” (1997), “Unbreakable” (2000) and “White Oleander” (2002).
Something else was missing as well. Ms. Wright, 47, is a bit of a legend in Hollywood for passing on dozens of lucrative roles — in “Batman Forever” and “The Firm,” among others — and for fleeing the spotlight at every turn. As an actress, mother, wife — she was married to Sean Penn, with whom she has two children — she has lived a life of remove, with a reputation for reticence that some read as imperiousness. Having heard as much, I first approached the room on cat’s paws. But she smiled widely and said, “We’re going to get this started with a hug.” Gee, things were not going quite as I expected.
Ms. 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 Netflix’s grand tale of political intrigue (returning Feb. 14 and just renewed for a third season), and animated by working on the other side of the camera. “It feels like a second coming, not in a religious way, but for me personally,” she said, alighting on the top of a couch in a screening room. “I am the age I am, I have been in this business for a long time, and 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 I am embarking on.”
At the end of the first season, when Mr. Spacey, whom Ms. Wright said she loves working with and described as her “play date,” mentioned he might direct in the second season, she was surprised it was even a possibility.
“I said, ‘I want to, too,’ and I kept saying that to multiple parties,” she said. “They said, ‘Yeah sure,’ and I just kept saying it over and over. I was and am serious. I’m tired of biting my tongue. As an actor, I had noticed very vividly that very few directors know how to direct actors, because they haven’t done it. 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 — “it’s a comedy, believe it or not” — with Mr. Foster, and, given her performance in “House of Cards,” is very much back in the mix as an actress at a time when the movie industry seems ready to work with grown-ups. The Globe will add luster, as will her role in “A Most Wanted Man,” a movie starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. After years of picking and choosing her way through Hollywood, Ms. Wright is ready to engage as long as it is on terms that she can control.
Her role in “House of Cards” has grown in significance. Ms. Wright’s Claire is part of a power couple that bored its way into the public consciousness while viewers binged their way through the series. Mr. Spacey’s Frank is a kind of a land shark, snacking on every morsel he can. But for the larger game, he needs a partner, confidante and, occasionally, an opponent. It’s true that, as the “House of Cards” cinematographer Igor Martinovic said, “Robin is easy to shoot; she emanates light,” but the game her character plays is a dark one.
“She is a pragmatist in the art of war and that’s part of what people respond to — Claire is, um, effective,” Ms. Wright said. “I think those same characteristics in a man would be very much admired.” She understands the gender prism well, having endured gossip about her relationship with the younger Mr. Foster, an age gap that would not merit mention if she were male.
Apropos of nothing, she bolted to another couch and reassembled into an attentive pose. Even though she plays someone who carefully calibrates her every word and moves with deadly purpose, her background as a young ballet dancer was on display today. “I can’t stop moving,” she said. “I’m like this weird insect. I can’t sit still in real life.”
That might come in handy in the next stage of her career. “To be able to reload is remarkable,” she said. “I’m up against a lot — my reputation, you know, ‘Robin turns everything down,’ or ‘We haven’t seen her since ‘Forrest Gump.’ ”
Again, she unfolded, changed positions, then came to rest. “But it wasn’t like I was passing on amazing work,” she said. “I was a type. ‘Cast Robin, she’s really good with no dialogue, but you can watch her go through all the manifestations of pain and suicide and decide to live.’ ”
“If I was going to work, I wanted it to be a meaningful choice,” she added. “I don’t want to always be the tortured, soulful wife.”
It fell to Mr. Fincher, who directed her in “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” to persuade her not only to get back to work right away, but also to do TV, and do it for Netflix, a company better known for its deep reservoir of reruns than the creation of great narratives.
“She literally turned her back on the business, lived in Marin County, raised her family and didn’t chase roles,” Mr. 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, and we all thought she would be remarkable. Let’s just say it involved a lot of groveling.”
Part of what convinced him that the animated, impish Ms. Wright could play the imperious, inscrutable Claire Underwood was some flashes he saw on the set.
“She is so charming, and comes ready to work, 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 elegant and fundamentally unattainable about her. There is a distancing quality she uses to very good effect.”
It was a little hard to reconcile those professional impressions with the person I observed over the course of a few days. She and Mr. Foster are like-minded peas in a pod who are full of monkeyshines and capers. At a small Globes pre-party for “House of Cards” in the Beverly Hills backyard of Ted Sarandos, chief content officer at Netflix, all manner of Hollywood stopped by, including Brian Grazer and Harvey Weinstein. But no matter whom she was talking to, her eyes and attention went to Mr. Foster.
“He calls me ‘my lady,’ ” Ms. Wright said, standing by the backyard pool. “I don’t even know what era that is from, but he is, well, not my boyfriend. He is my man.”
They got to know each other while making “Rampart” (2011), but didn’t start dating until after the premiere.. Mr. Foster said Ms. Wright was able to project humanity into Claire in part because “people can tell there is something good and true underneath that.”
“People want and like to be around her,” he said. “I’m one of them.”
They left Mr. Sarandos’s home and went to a party in West Hollywood where Ms. Wright’s manager, Michael Sugar, was a host. Mr. Foster was skeptical about going — they are a new couple who draw attention that doesn’t meet any needs either of them have — but inside, they quickly joined Beau Willimon, a writer and the show runner of “House of Cards.”
In a room of people mostly schmoozing, they were like teenagers at a grown-up party. Mr. Foster gave Mr. Willimon a friendly hickey, and Ms. Wright danced with anybody near her. It was a joyful warm-up for the Globes, but as we left, paparazzi descended on the couple as we ran to the car. I shouted over the din that I didn’t want to be in the picture.
Mr. Foster laughed as he ran for it: “No one wants to be in the picture. No. One.”
Least of all Ms. Wright, whose feelings of being hunted were formed 15 years ago in Los Angeles.
“I was carjacked in my car in my driveway with my children in the car seats in the back, and I decided right then that I did not want to be here,” she said. “Back then, I walked outside with my kids carrying coffee on the corner, and paparazzi are popping out of the bushes. I’m bored, I’m bored with ducking, I’m bored feeling that I’m in a terrorist city wondering if somebody’s going to come out with a gun. That’s what it feels like. I think that dictated the following 15 years in my life as a career woman who had children.”
Her children are now grown, and she and Mr. Foster have a place in New York. But as Ms. Wright’s profile rises, don’t look for her on a lot of red carpets. She is re-engaging, but not with that part of the apparatus if she can help it. She was surprised and almost confused by her win at the Globes, an event she had been dreading. “I don’t get the awards ceremony theory, or rather I don’t understand the religion of it,” she said. “It’s not my religion. There’s a gratitude in hearing my name, but I don’t understand anybody deciding what is good and not good work.”
The rapprochement is underway, but the terms are different this time around.
“I’m not going to sit and wait for a job offer or a prospect, someone to tell me something I might be good at,” she said by phone later. “I want to make things, develop things, direct things, working with Ben and others. By this point, I think I have some understanding of what work might be good and how to go about it.”
After the Globes, she and Mr. Foster walked into a party at the Beverly Hilton. Everyone was lined up to offer congratulations, but Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” came on. “Ben knows that’s my favorite song,” she said. She tore it up, oblivious to the staring crowd and mouthing the words of the chorus that suggest, after all, “I know you want it.”