First Look: ‘The Gilded Age’ Season Four Spells Trouble for the Russells

The show, which typically films its sumptuous mansion interiors in Bethpage, Long Island, at Gold Coast Studios, is now expanding its locations to dozens of others across New York and Newport. “It really feels like a multiverse,” Benton says. “I kind of compare it to Game of Thrones and the way that you had all these different kingdoms in these different worlds that you went to. And I feel like New York and Brooklyn are our kingdom in Newport, and we have the different Gildedverses.”

That ability to move effortlessly between boroughs, but also thematically between spectacle, comedy, romance, and genuine emotional drama may be the secret to The Gilded Age’s increasingly distinctive register. Carrie Coon, whose Bertha Russell has cemented her position as New York society’s newest power player, becoming one of the show’s central forces, describes that register as a narrow channel.

Although Coon has been nominated at the Emmys twice for the role, she says she still feels aware of the balancing act of nailing the tone of the series. “You feel when you’re too big, but you also feel when you’re too small. And sometimes if you’ve been gone, trying to find the channel again is challenging.”

“People come in as guest stars and they’re surprised by just how challenging it is to find the pocket of where the show lives,” Coon says.

After nearly six years of making the series, however, Jacobson says the performers have had an unusual luxury: time. “It’s a really rare opportunity to get to spend so much time, not just with a character, but with a whole world and all of these people,” she says. “So we’ve been building relationships for five-and-a-half years. We just are building experiences and community and friendship and everything so that when you actually start to act, it doesn’t feel like you have to try that hard to imagine a history. We’re building a history.”

That history is particularly important this season because some of The Gilded Age’s most established relationships are being tested.

Season four finds Bertha and her husband, George, played by Morgan Spector, reeling with the fact that the problems that once came from outside their new-money mansion are increasingly coming from within it.

“We find out that George has not really forgiven Bertha from what he sees as a transgression,” Coon says of the resentment that stemmed from her character marrying their daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), off to the Duke of Buckingham, whom she did not love. “He thinks she has meddled in a very compromising way in their children’s personal lives.

“He is ruthless, but he’s ruthless in business—not with his family.” Coon says. “What he doesn’t understand is that that’s the only place Bertha gets to operate, through this sphere.”

“Though she will have the social pressure and she will have to maintain her status in society, this season Bertha’s got some problems at home that she has to deal with, and that’s where she’s going to keep her focus,” Coon says.

Morgan Spector, who plays George, says the breakdown is profound.

“It’s a mess,” says Spector. “A good marriage that’s actually fairly equal for the time, and egalitarian, and where there’s healthy communication and all that stuff. All of that has really broken down and been lost.” And with news that Gladys has a baby on the way, the Russells’ marriage is crumbling right as they prepare to become grandparents. “So that was the thing we were wondering,” Spector says. “Are we going to actually navigate divorce for the Russells? Are we going to see the two of them go off and date other people, or figure out separate lives, or are they going to be slowly, gradually working their way back together?”

Even outside his marriage, “George Russell is in the midst of a real midlife crisis,” Spector says of his character’s recovery after the shooting that served as the emotional climax of season three. His survival has forced him to reckon with the life he has built and whether he wants to continue living it in the same way.

“I think the most fundamental relationship in his life has really disintegrated,” Spector says, “and I think he doesn’t know which end is up.”

Spector, 45, sees something recognizable in George’s existential moment. “I’ve certainly experienced a moment of going, Okay, this is how I’ve gotten to where I am now. Is this what I want my life to look like?’” he says. “How do I want the latter half of my life to be?”

Jacobson also finds herself relating more to Marian than ever before. “I came out three years ago and I’m going to be 35 in June. People are doing the marriage-kids thing really late, but it’s still a thing. I see some friends starting to go that route, or my straight friends who’ve been in very long relationships are beginning to get engaged. As a career person at 35, I’m really having trouble knowing if that’s the path for me,” she says. “And I think, similar to Marian, I don’t know. I think Marian’s like, It’s not calling to me in the way that it’s just automatic to everyone else—and is there something wrong with me for that?”

Meanwhile the scheming, closeted Oscar Van Rhijn and widower Enid Winterton, played by Blake Ritson and Kelley Curran, have joined forces to disrupt society’s carefully curated pecking order—and have a bit of fun as they do it. “The goal is to become the pinnacle of high society. It’s to take down Mrs. Astor, to shoot past Mrs. Russell, and to be the king and queen of high society,” says Ritson. “They’re always boundary-pushing individually and now as a pair,” adds Curran. “So it’s double the fun.”

In the fourth season, Richardson-Whitfield says, the characters are increasingly forced to decide what they actually want to leave behind.

“This season is about legacy and all of our characters really growing into their true selves, and finding themselves,” she says. “Even for Bertha, who seems to have it all, what does she really want out of life? Is it just money? Is it family? How do I have it both?”

For Peggy, the answer may be found in her journey from ingenue to becoming a leading woman in her own right.

Benton says that Peggy is entering her “It girl, renaissance woman of Brooklyn” era, evolving from the aspiring young writer viewers met at the beginning of the series into an ambitious woman, whose world is increasingly of her own making. She sees the character’s increasing prominence as part of the larger expansion of the show’s Black world.

“It feels very connected to me as well,” Benton says, “to get to this season, to really see Peggy get to take center stage and take up a lot of space, and to have one of our most successful seasons last season also be one of the seasons we got to see so much of the Black world.”

There is a personal element to that evolution for Benton, who says it is rare for Black women to be given this kind of space on prestige television. “And so I, for one, selfishly am thrilled and selflessly am hoping that it leaves so much more space behind me as well,” she says.

She even has awards on the brain. “I feel like season four is maybe Peggy’s Emmy arc,” Benton says, knocking on wood. “I don’t know if you’re allowed to say that as an actor. It’s okay. I’m ambitious.”

The cast has become a kind of living monument to New York theater, with Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Donna Murphy, Kelli O’Hara, Audra McDonald, and many others bringing Broadway pedigrees to the series. (“There’s more Tonys on The Gilded Age than in Brooklyn,” quipped production designer Bob Shaw). Season four adds even more theater talent: Tony-winner Bonnie Milligan and Tony-nominee Taylor Trensch join the cast, along with comedian Jim Gaffigan. “There’s no drama,” Jacobson says of working alongside the theatrical legends. “Everyone’s a real professional and they also take the work very seriously.”

That work is animated by an increasingly extraordinary production apparatus. Costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone and her team alone are responsible for thousands of garments. This season, Walicka-Maimone estimates, the production will use roughly 5,000 costumes, inspired by roughly 50,000 images drawn from historical archives and museums, made by about 600 people.