Grab your finest hat and call the horse and carriage! The women of ‘The Gilded Age’ are back for more. The cult favorite HBO show will return for Season 4 on Nov. 1
Season 3 left off on a tumultuous and dramatic note, with the Russell family reeling from the assassination attempt of George Russell, played by Morgan Spector. His wife Bertha Russell (played by Carrie Coon), attempts to save face by throwing a large ball in Newport, Rhode Island, only to have George tell her that he isn’t happy – and leave for New York.
At the PaleyFest premiere of Season 4, actress Carrie Coon told The Knockturnal how she feels her character has changed over the past three seasons.
Courtesy of The Paley Museum
“She’s lost her safe place for intimacy. She’s lost touch with George,” says Coon. “And so I think what we see is that she’s being forced to turn her focus to the house, to the home.”
When it comes to playing Bertha Russell. Coon says her fashion is integral to getting into character.
“Look, once you get that wig on, and usually maybe a giant hat, and then you bang on all those clothes, then you’re most of the way there, honestly.”
Ada Forte, played by actress Cynthia Nixon, also went under a character transformation over the last three seasons.
“I feel like Ada was a very girlish person. Even though she was not young anymore, she never became a woman. She never grew into herself and owned her power, or had any power to own, really. And we’ve watched her learn to stand up for herself,” Nixon told The Knockturnal. “We’ve watched her find love. We’ve watched her lose love. We’ve watched her become the head of a household. I think if you had asked Ada, or even Cynthia, in the first season, ‘Do you think this will happen?’, neither one of us would have believed it. But that’s what life is like. You think your life is one particular way, you’re going down a road, and all of a sudden you’re in the woods.”
Back for Season 4 is powerhouse writer and executive producer Sonja Warfield. At the premiere, Warfield teased a bit of what we might see this upcoming season.
“What I can tell you is that the show is about power and ambition, and what that does to relationships [it] can either make them or break them,” said Warfield. “So I think relationships are on the brink of lots of different outcomes this season. Whether they’re going to make it, or whether they’re not going to make it, or whether a new relationship is going to happen.”
Warfield says that when writing the show, inspiration can come from anywhere: even her own experiences.
“Yes, we’re writing about people in the 1880s, but human beings don’t change in terms of what we desire,” said Warfield. “We all still want our families to do well. We’re all still ambitious. We all want love. We all want safety. People still gossip about other people. So that is not a challenge in terms of finding inspiration. And these characters are their own people. They’re so well developed that they drive the story.”
She describes working alongside the actresses of The Gilded Age as a ‘gift.’
“It’s a master class on acting, on writing, on their process. I cherish it. I’m so grateful for it. I love getting text messages from Cynthia that ask questions, because ultimately what I write on the page comes out of their mouth and it has to be believable,” said Warfield. “So I love to collaborate with actors, and the fact that I get to collaborate with Cynthia Nixon and Carrie Coon and Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald, all of them… I’m the luckiest girl in the world.”
