From ‘Downton Abbey’ to ‘The Gilded Age’: Why the new period drama is all class

When ‘Downton Abbey’ brought the machinations of the British aristocracy to our TV screens more than a decade ago, the world sat riveted with the voyeuristic look into the Crawley family’s struggles with a vanishing class system.

Creator Julian Fellowes hopes to repeat the prurient appeal through ‘The Gilded Age’, the new HBO show that gives viewers a front-row seat into 19th century America.

Written by Fellowes and Sonja Warfield, and directed by Michael Engler and Salli Richardson-Whitfield, the nine-episode drama series stars an ensemble cast that includes names such as Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Denée Benton, Louisa Jacobson, Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski.

For non-history buffs, the American Gilded Age is best described as a ‘period of immense economic change, of great conflict between the old ways and brand new systems, and of huge fortunes made and lost’, according to the makers of the show.

Against the backdrop of this transformation, ‘The Gilded Age’ begins in 1882 with young Marian Brook (Jacobson) moving from rural Pennsylvania to New York City after the death of her father to live with her thoroughly old money aunts Agnes van Rhijn (Baranski) and Ada Brook (Nixon).

Accompanied by Peggy Scott (Benton), an aspiring writer seeking a fresh start, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbours, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George (Spector) and Bertha Russell (Coon). Exposed to a world on the brink of the modern age, Marian struggles to follow the established rules of society, while attempting to forge her own path.

Ahead of the show’s release, Gulf News caught up with the lead cast, along with showrunner Fellowes and Executive Producer Gareth Neame to walk us through ‘The Gilded Age’ as seen by its makers.

Julian Fellowes: For me, it started a long time ago, because I got interested through a book I read about Alva Vanderbilt, and her daughter Consuela, who were one of the more famous of the dollar princesses who came across from Europe to America in the 1800s to rescue a failing noble house.

After I read it, I realised I didn’t really understand the Gilded Age being a phenomenon in the way that it was. And so I started to read about [American magnate] Jay Gould and [American industrialist] Andrew Carnegie and all of these people from that time, and that sort of bubbled along until it occurred to me that there might be a series in there.

At one point, I was fiddling around with doing a series about the Vanderbilts. But then I found that very constricting, because if you write about real people, you’ve got to write what really happened. And so I moved on to inventing fictional Gilded Age families where you could take real events and real episodes and use them as much as you like.

Gareth Neame: It flowed from ‘Downton Abbey’ really. When we were making the third season of ‘Downton’, we were just fascinated by how big the show had become in America. By then, Julian and I had been working together for several years but I didn’t know about this Vanderbilt script. Yet, when I read it I realised he was also interested in the New York history around the Gilded Age, like me and it took off from there.

Fellowes: I’ve been reading about American history for quite a long time and a big fan of Edith Wharton [American novelist, 1862-1937], who helped me through quite a lot of it. So is co-writer Sonja Warfied. And because we are both from the School of Wharton, we connected.

What helped was that American history itself is very absorbing. The Gilded Age is a very vivid episode in history, following so soon after the equally vivid, but unglamorous episode of the American Civil War. And so you have these mammoth dramatised periods coming one after another that makes for absolutely gripping stories to tell.

Louisa Jacobson: I started from the outside in. When I started doing research, I actually went to the New York Public Library, which is a Gilded Age building right on 42nd and fifth in New York. This is before the pandemic and I was there every day reading encyclopedias and getting a general sense of the time period. I also watched some documentaries, but I still felt very much outside of it. I was like, okay, so how do I apply this to a human being? So I read ‘The House of Mirth’ by Edith Wharton and ‘Age of Innocence’, along with ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James and that really helped.

I was influenced by all those heroines but Edith Wharton paints such a vivid picture of the inner workings of the mind of a young white woman at that time in New York City society. And though Marian is very different from them in a lot of respects, because she’s grown up outside of that completely, it still helped me a lot. But there was a lot of work that I had to do on my own, imagining what Marion’s upbringing would have been like with her father fighting in the Civil War for a lot of her childhood, and not having a mother. So I had to make up some of that myself.

Denee Benton: I’m so deeply in love with Peggy Scott and how much she felt like a reflection of myself and a sense of belonging and history. Our experiences are just so similar with our identity as Black educated women in America who grew up in sort of an upper middle class environment. And for me to be able to point to someone in the 1880s, who shared my experience just sort of created this, I don’t know, spiritual ancestral connection to her.

I feel that being an actor to me was similar to her using writing as a tool to be the arbiter of her own freedom. She’s dealing with the patriarchy in her home and then she’s dealing with the white supremacy outside of her home. And writing is where she gets to find her own path outside of the limited imaginations around her.

Christine Baranski: Well, we did sort of grow up together. I was Cynthia’s mother in a Tom Stoppard play back in 1983. She was a charming sprightly college student at Barnard and I was a pregnant lady playing the aggrieved wife of Jeremy Irons. I became pregnant shortly after we opened and Cynthia and I would be backstage together with her wanting to put her hand on my belly and feel the baby kicking. And so we go back in a kind of marvelous way.

So when I was offered ‘The Gilded Age’, she texted me and said, ‘Is it true that you’ve been offered a role because and they’ve offered me too’ and I was like, ‘Oh, please, God, let this happen.’ It’s been a long period of time since we have worked together but I think we share a sense of humour that reflected in Ada and Agnes on the show. There is so much in that relationship that has the humour of an old married couple. These are two people who live with each other, who get on each other’s nerves but are also very protective of each other. And it’s s a very challenging thing to act as a as a married couple, because there’s just so much worn fabric there, but I just think we made it work.

Cynthia Nixon: I certainly echo everything that that Christine just said. The chance to work with Julian was very exciting, and I fell in love the scripts immediately, but knowing that Christine was trying to work on her schedule to play Agnes was a tremendous bonus for me. And I think it’s okay to mention that Christine became pregnant during our production almost 40 years ago with two daughters who she named Isabel and Lily after Isabel Archer and Lily Bart [fictional characters from ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ and ‘The House of Mirth’].

That said, I guess I completely echo what Christine said about Ada and Agnes. They are an old married couple but for Ada, having Marian move into their home is literally the most exciting thing that has ever happened in her life. The idea that Marian is going to come and live with them and that she has a chance to have a surrogate daughter and to help a young woman in the beginning of her life at a crucial time is everything. Especially since Ada feels she fell through the cracks, and no one was there helping her and protecting her and making sure she had a home and a family had a full life.

Fellowes: For me, it’s very important, I have a sort of obsession with detail. And, I think Garris shares that with me. I feel that if you make a show truthful, if your characters say things they might have said at that time, then even people who have no historical knowledge will look at the show with an air of authenticity. I remember when I was watching ‘Monsoon Wedding’ years ago and I didn’t know anything about modern India. But I thought I bet it’s really like this. I bet this is truthful. And I later worked with the director, Mira Nair and of course it was. I got that sense of it without any knowledge of the subject. And that’s what I hope, fussing about the detail and driving the prop people mad achieves the same for us.

—————————

‘The Gilded Age’ is streaming now on OSN