For two seasons, Denée Benton, Taissa Farmiga, and Louisa Jacobson have served as witnesses to all the opulence and melodrama of The Gilded Age‘s grande dames. Now, it’s their turn.
Both Benton and fellow Gilded Age actress Taissa Farmiga, who plays Gladys Russell, are perched on a couch in the Town & Country office wearing comfy bathrobes and full glam, ready for the photoshoot seen here; their costar Louisa Jacobson, who plays Marian Brook, is in a nearby chair wearing a sleek jumpsuit. The scene could be something out of a modern ladies-who-lunch spa day. The three women are laughing and talking over one another, finishing each other’s sentences. They only recently wrapped filming season three of the series, which premieres this Sunday, June 22 on HBO Max, but they are eagerly catching up.
Almost immediately they start to gush about their fellow cast members, their names spilling out like a laundry list of theater icons. “We are getting to sit at the feet of legends,” Benton says. “I feel like I’ve gotten to apprentice a masterclass of performance, getting to work with Audra [Mcdonald, who plays her mother Dorothy] and John [Douglas Thompson, her on-screen father] and Phylicia [Rashad, who joins The Gilded Age this season as the mother of Peggy’s new love interest]. Christine [Baranski] had us over and was talking about, ‘Oh, Steve Sondheim gifted me this’ and how she would take the bus two hours in and out of the city every day when she was on Broadway but also raising her kids. You’re just getting gold. I’ve all asked them to coach me on auditions; John has coached me on a Shakespeare audition. Cynthia [Nixon] coached me on my Gypsy audition; I’m just mining them for their genius all the time.”
The comparison of The Gilded Age cast and crew to a theater company comes up multiple times in our conversation. “It’s a lot of artists who care so much about what they do. That’s a luxury,” Jacobson says, sharing that she’s gotten ample “life advice” from the older members of the team.
Farmiga was practically on the edge of her seat ready to talk about her own on-screen family. “My parents, my God, I am just so grateful because on the show, you kind of work in groupings, you know what I mean? And I’m very grateful that my bubble is a fucking fantastic bubble. Carrie [Coon], Morgan Spector, just incredibly intellectual people, super witty and funny, but kind. And their chemistry is so intoxicating, just like their friendship in real life and then their romance on the show. I don’t feel like I have to pretend much when we’re doing our family scenes,” she says, acknowledging that while most people are going to say they enjoy who they work with during press interviews, on their set, “there is this higher sense of comradery and gratitude.”
Sitting in front of me, cursing and laughing with her colleagues in her true voice as opposed to a practiced period dialect, Farmiga is a far cry from the demure heiress she plays on screen, and yet, she sees the similarities between herself and her character. “Gladys reminds me of my young teen self,” she says. “The thing Gladys craves the most is freedom. It’s something I craved very much when I was a teenager, and she especially craves freedom from her mother. And in the season, the manner in which she finds that freedom actually brings her closer to her mother Bertha, which is not something that was expected.”
Farmiga was perhaps an unconventional choice for the role of Gladys. Something of a modern day scream queen, she’s more known for appearing in multiple seasons of American Horror Story, and the Nun franchise than any sort of period piece. But the world of gore and jumpscares isn’t necessarily a natural fit. “I am the biggest scaredy cat,” she says, “I don’t like blood. I don’t like fake blood. But somehow that became my niche. And then, The Gilded Age came up. It was something new. HBO is phenomenal, so I wanted to work with them on a project in a realm that I hadn’t really touched before.”
With an overbearing mother, the prospect of becoming a duchess, and a storyline this season that Farmiga describes as a “wild emotional rollercoaster ride,” Gladys bears more than a passing resemblance to Conseulo Vanderbilt, one of the so-called “dollar princesses,” new-money American society women flush with cash married off to the titled-yet-broke English aristocracy. (If this sounds familiar, look only to Cora Crawley’s background in Downton Abbey.) But those with any knowledge of Consuelo’s life and her loveless marriage to the 9th Duke of Marlborough can only hope for Gladys’s sake that their stories play out differently.
“The Gilded Age is a period piece, but we haven’t traveled that far from the same societal battles that they were fighting then that we’re fighting now: the fight for equality, women’s rights, people of color, for us in the queer community,” Farmiga says. “We’re still going for the same thing even though it’s 140, 150 years later.”
At this point, HBO has yet to confirm a fourth season of the show, but the actresses are eager to continue the story and to keep broadening the scope to include more depictions of history that isn’t well known, particularly of the queer community at this time in New York City.
“It’s nice to share history that I think a lot of people haven’t learned about and do it in a beautiful fucking package,” Farmiga says, and Benton agrees. “I think there are really cool opportunities for breaking the world open even more,” she says, referencing in particular the activist spaces Peggy and Marian begin to move through in season three.
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