Cast and Creators of THE GILDED AGE Get a Big Charge From Big Change in Season 3

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede   “Who’s in charge here?” That familiar phrase is not merely the title of the first episode in the third season of HBO’s THE GILDED AGE, which premieres Sunday, June 22 on Crave, but it’s also an existential question facing many of the main characters in the 1890s-set drama. First up we have the Russells, with married couple Bertha (played by Carrie Coon) and George (Morgan Spector) facing a crisis in their marriage for the first time. After a long period of co-conspiratorial success as financial and social climbers in New York City society, Bertha and George have developed different philosophies regarding the marriage goals of their daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga). “You marry someone, you’re incredibly happy for 10 years, you are pretty happy for about 20, and then it starts to go wrong, and you can’t believe it,” said Julian Fellowes, the creator and co-writer (with Sonja Warfield) of THE GILDED AGE, in a panel interview. “You think, ‘how can all this be going wrong, when for 20 years we’ve been perfectly all right?’ And that’s the situation George and Bertha are in, because they finally hit some kind of fundamental awareness.” Coon quipped that Bertha’s situation has given her cause for pause, not only with her real-life marriage, but also with the raising of her kids. “I’m living it, too, just hopefully with a little more awareness as to what I’m doing to my children,” Coon said. “But now all I’m thinking about is how I have, like, 13 more good years left before my marriage goes south. Thanks, Julian. I do think I should prepare for that, whatever that looks like. But I have a lot of respect for what Bertha’s doing, because I understand why she’s doing it. You may disagree with the way she’s going about it, but it is rooted in a deep love for her daughter.” Basically, Bertha wants Gladys to marry an English Duke, for all the prestige and influence that comes with it. Industrialist – a.k.a. robber baron – George is more inclined to let his daughter marry for love. “I don’t think George can really let go of the fact that there’s an implicit critique of his own position in society that Bertha is making,” Spector explained. “You know, if you have to marry an English aristocrat to really feel like you’ve arrived, then the sort of status that George has built for himself isn’t enough. I think that’s another source of tension and unspoken friction between them.” Meanwhile, across the street, the question of “who’s in charge here?” is even more acute. Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), who has long ruled the roost both financially and with her steely personality, is now essentially broke, due to the financial transgressions of her son. Agnes’ recently widowed sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) has come to the rescue just in time, after being shocked to discover that her late husband was secretly wealthy. The grand house needn’t be sold after all. What a relief for everyone, right? Well, sure, but all of this has led to an awkward power shift. “I’m always rather fascinated by people who pretend that the loss of money, the loss of position, doesn’t affect them at all, that everything can just go on as it did before – of course, it can’t,” Fellowes said. “Even today, we know that. But here we have Agnes, whose belief in the essentially European concept of ‘greatness by birth’ can’t be shifted, starting out pseudo-confident that everything will be as normal. But we know it won’t, because we’ve come to understand that while Ada, through Cynthia’s wonderful performance, is a compliant person and wants things to be easy, it doesn’t mean she has no beliefs. I just wanted to explore that shift, really. And it has to be between the sisters. They have to come to terms with what is different.” Members of the household staff are the first to be impacted in a practical manner, as they start to receive conflicting instructions from Agnes and Ada. “Yummy,” said Baranski when asked what it was like to explore the new Agnes-Ada arrangement. “I mean, it’s not good news for Agnes, but it’s great news for Christine and for Cynthia. You know, when royalty falls off the throne, it makes for good story-making, and it also makes for delicious comic moments. We’ve had a lot of fun with it, haven’t we?” Nixon replied, “yeah, it has been so great. When (director and EP) Michael Engler said to me at the end of Season 1, ‘oh, you know, we’re going to marry (Ada) off next season,’ I was very startled. ‘And then we’re going to kill him. And then he’s going to turn out to have been very wealthy, and you’re going to save the day, and be mistress of the house.’ I mean, I just thought I had this nice part, and I knew who she was, and then, wow, we were off to the races. It’s as if we’ve had one political party in power for a very long time, and all of a sudden the opposition is now in charge, and has to make everything happen that they’ve been grumbling about.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv