Julian Fellowes and Cast Break Down Season 3 Premiere

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the Season 3 premiere of “The Gilded Age,” now streaming on HBO Max.

“Don’t you know a bad marriage is a prison?” Bertha Russell asks her daughter Gladys towards the end of the first episode of the third season of “The Gilded Age.”

Well, for the first two seasons of the HBO period drama, the Russells’ marriage has been an ideal union of two striving, wildly ambitious people, drawn together by their shared desire to reign over New York City. George Russell took care of making the dough, using his business smarts to run circles around the old money elite, while Bertha brought high society to heel, deploying their riches to bulldoze past all the blue bloods. But their united front is cracking. Bertha is determined to marry Gladys off to the Duke of Buckingham even though her daughter only has eyes for a “non-entity” named Billy Carlton. As for George, he just wants Gladys to be happy. This spells trauma for the Russells’ domestic tranquility, particularly as the episode ends with Gladys fleeing the house and, presumably, her mother’s plans for her future.

Across 61st St., Ada Forte is putting her stamp on the van Rhijn household. Having unexpectedly come into a fortune when her husband died last season, Ada is putting her inheritance to use backing settlement houses and, to the horror of her sister Agnes, the temperance movement. Agnes isn’t just aghast because she enjoys wine with dinner. She’s grappling with the fact that her son Oscar’s disastrous decision to trust a con artist with the family savings left her penniless and dependent on Ada for hearth and home. But Agnes can’t stop barking orders, leaving the household staff at a loss over who to listen to — their domineering former boss or the woman signing their paychecks.

No one would ever call “The Gilded Age” action packed. After all, a key storyline last season involved Jack the footman’s application for a patent for an alarm clock he designed. However, this season three opener has a surprising number of twists and turns. Things are going swimmingly for Peggy Scott, hard at work on a novel, until a nasty cold leaves her in desperate need of medical assistance. Jack has gone into business with Larry Russell and the pair are having success attracting backers for the aforementioned clock (that patent came in handy!). And, most explosively, prim and proper Aurora Fain, who bedecked herself in geegaws for a night at the opera, is left reeling after her husband announces he’s fallen in love with another woman. Who needs “La Traviata” when a Gilded Age divorce is on the menu?

To break it all down, and get a sense of all the social climbing in store this season, Variety sat down for high tea, complete with pots of Earl Grey and cucumber sandwiches, with creator Julian Fellows, co-writer and executive producer Sonja Warfield and “The Gilded Age” stars Morgan Spector (George Russell), Carrie Coon (Bertha Russell), Cynthia Nixon (Ada Forte) and Christine Baranski (Agnes van Rhijn).

The first episode is entitled “Who Is in Charge Here?.” How did you land on that?

Julian Fellowes: I must confess, the moment I learned the first episode was called “Who Is in Charge Here?” was about 20 minutes ago. But I’ll take credit for it. I have no shame.

Sonja Warfield: Thematically, it demonstrates what we’re doing for the whole season. We’re examining the power shifts in the Brook house and in the Russell house. This season, power dynamics change for all our characters across the world we’re creating.

Whether its Ada discovering she’s rich and Agnes accepting she’s penniless or George and Bertha seeing their marriage strained over their divergent ideas about what’s best for their daughter, a lot of the relationships in this episode are being tested, even destabilized. Was that something you were keen to explore?

Fellowes: You have to keep destabilizing relationships, otherwise you’re just watching a lot of people being happy. You must keep changing the game, because you must keep having the characters thinking that new possibilities are being opened up for them or doors are being shut to them. Once you have no change, then you have no television.

Warfield: When I do character work, there’s a book I refer to called “The Birth Order Book.” It argues that birth order plays a big role in how people show up in life. And so what I wanted to examine with Cynthia and Christine was to reverse that relationship. She’s the older sister, but what happens when you give the younger one all the power?

Fellowes: I remember when I was quite young going to Glamis Castle. The late queen mother grew up there, and she was the youngest daughter. And you saw when you got to the house that a special sitting room had been set apart for her and her husband, and all these rooms had been added to an apartment that had been designed for her to stay in when she chose to visit her parents. None of her older brothers and sisters had that arrangement. It was her’s because she was a special one now, and I remember thinking at the time, I wonder how this went down at breakfast when they explained it to her siblings. I’ve always been rather fascinated by how things can change the dynamic of a family. Maybe someone was the younger brother and they were bullied by their older brother, but they have the power now. Or maybe the older brother is furious that the young one has become a film star or head of industry, or whatever it is. I love all that. That’s my meat and drink.

This season doesn’t open in Newport or New York. It starts in the Old West. Why the change in locale?

Fellowes: I’ve always been very interested in the fact that all of America’s history was happening at once. And you know, the Wild West, which we’ve all grown up on, and the East Coast, where people are trying to make their daughters marry English peers and building palaces on Fifth Avenue, existed simultaneously. We wanted to remind the audience that we haven’t forgotten about the Wild West — we know it was going on.

You were talking about destabilizing characters. Well, George starts the episode by barking orders in the saloon and trying to assert his control. But the second that gun goes off, he looks completely out of his element.

Morgan Spector: George is not familiar with gunfire. That is not part of the world that he’s in. No matter how how much bravado you have, when a gun is fired four feet from your head, it’s pretty terrifying.

Carrie and Morgan, how did you approach the confrontation in the bedroom where George and Bertha clash over their very different visions for Gladys’ future?

Carrie Coon: That’s the beginning of our conflict this season. We are stating our positions early on. I always assumed that the season would end with a wedding, and I thought that would lead to friction, but to have it come in the first episode surprised me. George is the one person that Bertha can be vulnerable around, and I think she’s going to become more isolated as the season goes on and she starts losing the person she can fully express herself around. And George isn’t sharing what is going on with his business and the risks he’s taking to build it. He could lose everything, but she doesn’t know that. Bertha is very confident in her position. She thinks she’s doing what’s right.

Spector: It becomes clear immediately that the problem between them is quite intractable. There’s no give in either direction for either of them. You can feel immediately that there’s real trouble coming for them.

Bertha used her daughter as a pawn to win the opera war by getting the Duke to join her on opening night in exchange for promising Gladys’ hand in marriage. That’s horrible, but her justification for what she’s doing makes sense: She’s right that Gladys will have a more interesting life with the Duke than she would with Billy. She will have the power to influence fashion and society by being married to someone so prominent.

Coon: That makes is so much more interesting for an audience. What I love about that scene is that when one person is speaking, you relate to their argument and understand their position. But when Morgan starts talking, you realize he makes good points too. Gladys does deserve happiness. Morally, it’s not black and white.

Spector: Bertha’s right that marrying the Duke might give Gladys more influence. But Bertha isn’t just thinking of Gladys. She’s interested in self-glorification as well. And for George, the nation needs the transcontinental railroad. This must happen. But also it is about his ego and his desire to stamp his name on the face of the country. Both George and Bertha share a deep desire to to create a legacy that will last. They want to dominate their surroundings. That’s what makes them so compatible, but it also leads them to a place of conflict.

Fellowes: I think that George is shocked when he realizes that Bertha has put to sleep his own moral reservations about the marriage. He is being expected to just swallow this, and, you know, buy a nice diamond bracelet for his daughter. I hope we have the opportunity to explore how he becomes disappointed by the person he’s become. He’s proud of his achievements, which are as much as any man could wish, but he’s haunted by his failure to stick up for his beliefs.

Then there’s Ada who has used her newfound position to turn the Brook household into a refuge for causes like temperance, while Agnes looks on horrified. Were you surprised by how easily Ada assumed her newfound power?

Cynthia Nixon: We really didn’t know if we were going to get a third season. The end of the second season was such a beautiful setup for everything that was to come. So we were worried we wouldn’t get to explore this new relationship.

Christine Baranski: We would come up with all these scenarios. We would joke that Agnes would never leave her bedroom because Ada would have filled the house with all these stray cats.

Nixon: I hope this is not unkind to my character to say, but Ada is 90% heart and 10% brain. Ada isn’t just an optimist who sees the best in everyone — she is essentially a woman-child. She is a person who, until very late in her life, was never married and had no responsibility. Ada has basically been kept in a box, so to all of a sudden be out there with all this money and responsibility and power, she is stumbling blindly through it. Ada gravitates towards the temperance movement because it’s a very womanly cause. She sees these women who are married to men who are drinking too much and spending all the household money on booze. The children are starving and the men are drunk and beating their wives, and their families. She diagnoses the problem correctly, but not the cure. She thinks the evil is from alcohol. It’s not that. In fact, the real problem is that women have no power in this situation.

Baranski: The best of what Agnes does is protect Ada from her own innocence. She wants to make sure she doesn’t waste her money and make foolish choices. Because Ada is an easy mark.

Agnes is a snob, but she’s also very progressive about race and about women’s suffrage. Why do you think she is so forward-thinking politically while being stuck in the past when it comes to the social order and traditions?

Baranski: I don’t think I’m a snob! I’m convinced I’m right, and I have standards. It’s very different. These women, they get dressed after breakfast. Then they’re sitting in that living room all day. Agnes doesn’t knit, she doesn’t embroider, she doesn’t have a dog. Instead, she’s reading the newspaper. I’m constantly asking the prop people to give me a book. She’s literate, and she’s very much into the local gossip. She’s the one who says, “Oh, this isn’t going to make Mrs. Astor very happy.” She’s reading all of the Page Six stuff. She’s interested in the times in which she lives, rather horrified by the times in which she lives, but wanting to understand them.

This season also deals with divorce after Aurora Fane’s husband decides to leave her. Why was that a subject you decided to explore?

Fellowes: Divorce has become a very normal thing in our life, but I still remember when it was disapproved of and you were expected to stick a bad marriage out. I wanted to explore a society which thought they were armed against divorce, only to see those social restrictions start to weaken. I also was interested in the etiquette of early divorce, where Aurora is expected to bring the case when she’s the one who doesn’t want to end the marriage. Then you have a character like Agnes. We’ve been talking about how intelligent and informed she is, but she shares the prejudices of her own time, and clearly she doesn’t mind giving Aurora dinner, but not in front of any witnesses.

Warfield: When Julian first brought up divorce, we talked about how it’s evolved. It’s so commonplace now. I’m divorced. But some things haven’t changed as much as you’d think. I used to throw an annual Easter brunch with another couple. Right after I got divorced, I called up the woman, and I said, “What are we doing for Easter Brunch this year?” And she told me I wasn’t invited. They chose him and not me.

Jack, the footman who invented a new alarm clock, has a line in the first episode where he tells a chambermaid, “in America, you don’t have to live like your parents lived.” How true was that?

Fellowes: It was true that you were much less limited in America than you were in Europe. But your future wasn’t unlimited. The idea of a footman making an invention, becoming fabulously rich and turning up at some dinner in London society, that just wouldn’t happen. In America with industrialization, you had people making vast fortunes who came from nowhere. Today, of course, people don’t care who you were born to or anything else, as long as you have a massive yacht where they can spend a lovely weekend. Being rich is so fashionable again.

This interview has been edited and condensed.