Kim Dickens is in the 'House'

LOS ANGELES — Is there really no stopping President Underwood?

Kim Dickens is about to find out.

Season 3 of House of Cards (available Friday on Netflix) finds Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) thwarting Congress as he tries to push a jobs program through while tackling crises with Russia. But he's about to face a new unknown: a thorn named Kate Baldwin.

Dickens, 49, joins House of Cards midway through Season 3 as a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist called in from the London office of the fictional Wall Street Telegraph when her protégé, Ayla Sayyad, faces escalating threats from the White House press secretary Seth Grayson (Derek Cecil).

Move over, Zoe Barnes! Dickens says Barnes (Kate Mara), the hungry young journalist Frank pushed in front of a subway train in the opening episode of Season 2, "was my favorite character." This season, Baldwin proves to be a formidable force in the press room. A seasoned, internationally recognized reporter, she "has nothing to lose," Dickens says. "She's interested in the truth. And she's very ethical. She just does her job. She has no one to protect. "

Baldwin also can't be bought — a conundrum for the Underwood staff.

On the set in Baltimore, Dickens says she got a kick out of watching Spacey entertain the extras between takes. No stranger to cult television (she has starred in critical hits including Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood and Friday Night Lights) Dickens says it felt surreal to be cast on her favorite show.

And it happened quickly: A week after executive producer and head writer Beau Willimon offered her the part, Dickens became a Beltway power player.

Is there rank and file among more senior members of the House of Cards staff? "They just really embrace you," says Dickens. "It's such a big ensemble. The people who are new last year are still there now so it felt really welcoming."

Despite a glitch that briefly made Season 3 available on Feb. 11, House of Cards has been operating under a Mad Men-style cloak of secrecy ahead of Friday's release. "I've been asked to not even say my character's name," says Dickens, who carefully steers around spoilers over coffee.

Meanwhile, Dickens is connected to another secretive project, the probable spinoff of AMC's zombie hit The Walking Dead. Cast in a starring role as a Los Angeles-based guidance counselor, she shot the pilot at the end of January. The show could receive a green light "really soon," she says.

"It's sort of a companion series rather than a spinoff," says Dickens, that's set far from Dead's Georgia. And "it's not necessarily at the same time."

After playing Detective Boney in Gone Girl, and getting "to go from there and be on my favorite TV show, and then to jump into a whole new exciting genre, I feel really really lucky," she says. "It's the greatest year ever!"