Actor Michael Kelly, who plays Doug Stamper on the Netflix drama series “House of Cards,” talked about how things are going on the show after the exit of Kevin Spacey, who was booted six months ago amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment.

In an exclusive interview with Variety, Kelly said he “couldn’t be happier” that the series was able to carry on — putting the crew back to work and enabling the key players to end the show on their own terms. He also noted that the central role played by Spacey has been taken over by his former co-star, Robin Wright.

“The crew was out of work for a long time, and when everything went down, it was sort of like, ‘How do we do it? How do we keep it going?,'” Kelly said, adding: “But it all worked out, and Robin is so frigging talented. I don’t want to say effortless because she works her a– off, but the way she portrays that character, it just … you work with her, and now the two of us have a lot together, where everything before was with Francis (Underwood). Now everything is with Claire, and it’s really been an interesting time.”

Kelly added: “To have all those years to have learned from Kevin, and now all this time to learn from Robin, it’s just like as an actor, you can’t ask for anything more than that, to learn under those two people. (It’s been) the greatest acting classes for the last six years.”

On Spacey’s exit, Kelly adds: “There’s obviously a million emotions that I went through, that I processed during this whole thing. I don’t want to talk too much about it because it was heartbreaking in so many ways.”

We encourage readers to click on the link above to Variety to read the full interview.