The Gilded Age season three: Carrie Coon and Christine Baranski are back for the ‘fall of a king’ in new money New York
Change is afoot among the aristocrats of Manhattan in a first look at The Gilded Age season three. The dust has settled on the Opera Wars, and the power balance between old money and new money has shifted, with Carrie Coon’s Bertha Russell climbing her way to the top of the social hierarchy and Chirstine Baranski’s Agnes van Rhijn losing her control over the New York elite.
A first look set of stills from the upcoming season of Julian Fellowes’ American answer to Downton Abbey shows that, while the wielders of influence might be changing, the lavish glamour of 19th-century New York is very much still in style. Fresh from a psychologically challenging stay at The White Lotus, Carrie Coon is back as the Russell matriarch, but now that Bertha’s finally broken into the upper echelons of the Big Apple, she is determined to stay there.
That means she’s all too eager to marry off her daughter (Taissa Farmiga’s Gladys Russell), even if it means a dubious match with the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb). Tying the knot with the Duke would cement the Russell family’s status as the new rulers of Manhattan, but it soon becomes clear that the English aristocrat is more enamoured with the family’s fortunes than their young heiress.
And by the sounds of things, the marriage market is about to turn sour in The Gilded Age, with the show’s creators hinting at a divorce-heavy plot arc in season three. ‘I think now we take divorce for granted,’ executive producer Sonja Warfield told Vogue, ‘whereas back then it was almost like a death sentence. They were trapped.’
Who might be severing ties when the show returns to HBO? If history tells us anything, it could well be Bertha herself who is set to split from her robber baron husband George Russell (Morgan Spector), who spends much of the season in the Wild West. Coon’s socialite is loosely based on Alva Vanderbilt, whose 1895 divorce from William K. Vanderbilt left her iced out from the high society circles over which she used to reign (fortunately, another marriage to Oliver Beaumont put her straight back to the top of the tower).
Indeed, last season chronicled the very real Opera Wars that broke out during the 1880s, which saw the downfall of the Astor-approved Academy of Music after they refused private boxes (a sure sign of social acceptance) to new money arrivistes like Alva, who went on to mastermind the Metropolitan Opera as a sign of her new reign over the city.
And while Bertha’s fortunes are on the up, another fan favourite character has seen her once iron grip over the well-to-do to be slightly less firm. Agnes van Rhijn, once the matriarch of her old-money family, has found herself shifted out of position by her quondam spinster sister, Ada (played by Cynthia Nixon).
‘She’s suddenly not the head of the household, which you can tell from the way season two ended, that this proud, haughty lady who was used to being number one is suddenly not that,’ Baranski told Deadline ahead of season three’s release.
‘So that fall from grace and that fall from power, that’s always such a delicious thing to play, and the fall of a King is just as exciting as the rise. So it makes for a lot of humour, I think, her having to eat humble pie.’
