‘Gilded Age’ Season 3 Finale: Carrie Coon on the Future of George and Bertha’s Marriage and That Devastating Last Scene
Bertha Russell should be on the top of the world.
As “The Gilded Age” ends its third season, Bertha (Carrie Coon) has pulled off yet another social triumph, putting together a glittering evening in Newport that also shattered the restrictions preventing divorced women from going to balls and other major events. Bertha’s old rival, Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), has finally been forced to loosen her stranglehold on the monied elite. And George (Morgan Spector) has survived being shot thanks to Dr. Kirkland. In fact, George looks remarkably robust for someone who took a bullet to the gut. Oh, and Bertha is about to be a grandmother to a little duke or duchess.
And yet, the Bertha we see right staring out the window right before the credits roll on the season finale is a shattered woman. Instead of bringing her closer to George, his near-death experience has made him more certain that their marriage, once so unshakable, may be irreparably broken. He cannot forgive Bertha for using their daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) as a pawn she can marry off to the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) in order to one-up Mrs. Astor.
“[The shooting] has made me examine my life, and I don’t like everything I see,” George tells Bertha shortly before he takes off from their Newport mansion. Could divorce court be in their future?
For Coon, playing Bertha this season has been a chance to show another side of her character. For the first two seasons, Bertha was an unstoppable force, determined to conqueror New York and put the Russell family at the forefront of an exciting new era of wealth and power. This season, her ambitions and those of George diverged, leaving Bertha unmoored.
“It’s always interesting to get to explore the vulnerability of a character,” Coon says. “She’s usually so confident in her actions, but this season she really didn’t anticipate the consequences of what she’s done and she’s blindsided. It’s very rattling for her.”
“The Gilded Age” has seen its ratings surge amid all the Russell family drama, with HBO recently renewing it for a fourth season. Coon spoke to Variety about what might be in store for Bertha and George, as well as for the high society she now rules.
The final shot of this season is a closeup of you looking stricken. What do you remember about filming the last scene?
It was very heartbreaking. We were working on the language of it before we shot it. Morgan Spector and I wanted to feel that Bertha and George were fully expressed in that scene. And our hearts were breaking over it as we were doing it. What the audience doesn’t see is that the first AD was outside in a raincoat, pretending to gallop away so I could get the eye line right. Instead of George dramatically escaping in a carriage, I was looking at one of the crew members pretending he was on a horse. The magic of cinema is alive and well.
When you say you were working on the language, what do you mean? Were you changing the lines?
After three years on the show, Morgan and I feel very protective of our of our characters. We wanted to make a few adjustments in what they were saying. We were just advocating for our sides of the argument, just to make sure that the audience understood where we were both coming from in that fight.
There’s a moment at the ball where George and Bertha reunite and it seems like this near death experience has brought them back together. In fact, it actually has made the fractures in their relationship more pronounced. Why do you think that’s the case?
The experience of marrying off Gladys was deeply unsettling for George. He really feels that he has failed his daughter, and then he has a near death experience, which is forcing him to have some spiritual confrontation where he is questioning his life choices. And Bertha can’t be fully inside of that experience, and she doesn’t really understand how it has changed him. She thought it was going to bring them closer together. But she understands better than ever what her priorities are, and he’s questioning all of his. That feels very real to me in longterm relationships. One person can go through a very transformative experience that the other person doesn’t have access to, and it takes them a while to find their way back to each other.
