Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector star in “The Gilded Age” as Bertha and George Russell.
“I think thematically the whole season [is] about who’s in charge; who is in charge in society, who’s in charge of marriages, who has the power. I think the power shift is relevant to all the stories and all the characters,” says Sonya Warfield, the co-writer and executive producer, about the new season of The Gilded Age.
Set in the United Stated during the 1880s, the series follows several families navigating the social landscape of a city undergoing rapid change, rife with conflict between old and new money. The Gilded Age explores themes of social mobility, wealth, class, and the changing American society during a time of immense industrial growth.
The series stars Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Cynthia Nixon, Christine Baranski, Louisa Jacobson, Taissa Farmiga, and Denee Benton. Along with Warfield, Julian Fellowes is the creator, the executive producer, and the co-writer of The Gilded Age.
Coon and Spector play Bertha and George Russell who are very concerned with the trajectory of their daughter, Gladys (played by Farmiga), hoping to marry her off to an appropriate suitor, which Fellowes says is accurate for the time period. However, he points out that, “Marian is resistant to the idea of simply settling down. She wants her life to be something. She wants to do something that adds up to more than getting dressed for the opera or not being late for dinner. But in that society, it was very difficult for women who weren’t content to simply run the house and run the children and say, ‘Have you had a good day dear.’ That was not enough for them.”
He adds, of Gladys’ story, much of which centers around her reluctance to adhere to the will of her parents, “I think that one of the key moments of growing up, for all of us, is when you realize you don’t have to follow your parents’ prejudices. You’ve loved them, and that’s great, but I [think this]
is also what young people have gone through always. It’s not disloyal, it’s just an acceptance that you are a different person from your parents.”
Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski star in “The Gilded Age” as Ada Brook and Agnes Van Rhijn.
Bertha’s drive to secure what she sees as the ideal future for her daughter causes issues in her relationship with George, Spector explains, saying, “The rift that develops between them is not a minor one. They see the situation of Gladys’ marriage in a fundamentally different way. And so, yeah, they’re pulling with all of the might of their separate identities in opposite directions.”
Coon jumps in to say that, “George can’t really understand the stakes for a woman. The woman’s purview is very different. He doesn’t understand our instinct for survival, which is, in this case, through marriage, so there really is a huge lack of psychological understanding between them that’s quite sad.”
As for what’s happening with sisters Agnes and Ada, played by Baranski and Nixon, respectively, Nixon, pipes in to reveal — just a bit — saying that things won’t be ‘status quo’ by any means for the pair.
“It is really fun to put these characters in different situations, [because] it’s not interesting to watch the same character do the same thing over and over again. It’s fun to take them and put them in a wildly different situation and watch them flounder and scramble and try and fake it until they make it.”
Playing Peggy Scott, Agnes’ secretary, and often confidante, Denee Benton, feels that her storyline, which features a look at Black society at the time, is helping people to understand the past in an unique way.
Jordan Donica and Denée Benton star as Dr. William Kirland and Peggy Scott in “The Gilded Age.”
“I think that Julian planting the seed of this Black elite world in our show and it getting to blossom into this garden with all of us watering it is just astounding to me. I’m learning history and I feel like I’m getting to embody something really important and I want to know more and more.”
While The Gilded Age features wealthy characters and problems that might seem outdated, this isn’t exactly the case, says Warfield, “[These] are universal themes for human beings, whether it’s love, death, marriage, all of that. And so, even though those people were around in the 1880s, those are still the themes that we live out today.“
Season three of ‘The Gilded Age’ premieres Sunday, June 22nd at 9 e/p on HBO Max. The series is also available for streaming on the HBO Max app.
