The Gilded Age actors Louisa Jacobson and Harry Richardson are sitting in a huge carriage in the pouring rain. Their characters, Marian Brook and Lar
The Gilded Age actors Louisa Jacobson and Harry Richardson are sitting in a huge carriage in the pouring rain. Their characters, Marian Brook and Larry Russell, have just twirled the night away and are further exploring their long-running will-they-or-won’t-they flirtation as two eligible juvenile people who live across the street from each other on East 61st Street in the overdue 1880s. But now, in the middle of a rainstorm, their carriage has stopped and started, bucking and weaving beneath them.
It was, Jacobson says, a little less romantic than it sounds.
“We’re shooting in a mechanical carriage,” Jacobson says excitedly as we chat on set in her dressing room before she films the rest of the scene from the fourth season of The Gilded Age. “I’m getting my little ass tossed around the carriage.”
The show returns to HBO on Sunday, November 1, and if the first episode is any indication, the Emmy-nominated series from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes is coming back bigger, bolder, and more active than ever.
“They were really reinventing America,” says Fellowes, of the historical period. “Modern America that we know now owes much more to the Gilded Age than it does to the 18th-century world of [Thomas] Jefferson and [George] Washington.”
Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon in The Gilded Age.HBO
“Episode one has so much stuff happening in it,” says director Salli Richardson-Whitfield, who has been with the series since its debut and directed three of the eight episodes of this season, including the premiere. “I think it’s going to be one of those episodes where it just sucks people in from the beginning, and they’re going to have to keep watching.”
That represents something of a tonal shift for The Gilded Age. The series has always moved at a deliberate pace, allowing the characters’ social battles and romantic intrigues to simmer. (Who can forget the episode devoted to whether Christine Baranski’s Agnes Van Rhijn deigns to cross 61st Street?) But the fourth season raises the stakes considerably on everything from whether to legitimate matters of marriage, legacy, faith, ambition—and, occasionally, life and death. “I think our show has been a slow burn, and then all of a sudden became this huge pop-culture hit last year,” says Denée Benton, who plays Peggy Scott.
