As Denée Benton puts it, the third season of “The Gilded Age” saw the show’s “multiverse expand.”
Benton plays Peggy Scott on the HBO drama, set in New York high society in the late 1800s. Season 3 saw Benton’s Peggy find love with Dr. William Kirkland (Jordan Donica), much to the chagrin of William’s snooty mother, Elizabeth (Phylicia Rashad) — who disapproves of the Scott family for many reasons, including their dark skin and the fact that Peggy’s dad is a pharmacist without generational wealth. Telling the story of the Black elite living in Newport, R.I., and the classism and colorism within that community was vitally important.
“The more we explore what really went on in that time, the more we can make Black characters in television, film and theater fully three-dimensional,” says Audra McDonald, who plays Peggy’s mother, Dorothy. “When I first heard about ‘The Gilded Age,’ I was like, ‘Oh, what servant am I going to be asked to play? What downtrodden character?’ So the fact that they’ve been so accurate, that’s been the most exciting thing for me.”
Nor has colorism — including in Hollywood — been consigned to the dustbin of history. “None of it has really changed,” Benton says.
The introduction of the Scotts’ tense dynamic with the Kirkland family, which also includes William’s dad, Frederick (Brian Stokes Mitchell), along with other relatives and friends, has helped the series stay “new and true,” according to Benton. “If we had gone the same old route of period dramas and tokenism, it would have fallen flat.”
Audra McDonald, left, and Denée Benton in “The Gilded Age.”
(Karolina Wojtasik / HBO)
Many of Peggy’s storylines in the first two seasons centered on the fact that her father, Arthur (John Douglas Thompson), upset that Peggy had married a man he deemed beneath her, got her marriage annulled, lied to her that her baby died at birth and secretly gave her son up for adoption. Peggy and Dorothy discovered the truth, only to learn that the little boy had since died of scarlet fever. By the show’s third season, however, Peggy and Dorothy seem to have forgiven Arthur for his horrific betrayal.
“This is a time when divorce really isn’t an option,” McDonald says. “So Dorothy is going to have to live with this man for the rest of her life, and she knows that. I think it would have been detrimental to Peggy if Dorothy were to have never forgiven Arthur. Dorothy needed to forgive Arthur to model that for Peggy.”
For Benton, Peggy’s forgiveness is “a part of a beautiful legacy”: “I think about how Alice Walker, Toni Morrison or August Wilson write about the generational trauma that could happen within Black families. … It was part of a really potent tale of redemption that I think many Black families can relate to — the way racism and patriarchy affects our family structures and how to keep reaching for each other’s humanity in the midst of all of these dehumanizing moments.”
Perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in the third season comes when William finds out about Peggy’s past from his meddling mother. Peggy goes from the joy of anticipating William’s marriage proposal to William asking her about her past, to a devastated Peggy in tears on the stairs in her parents’ house. The sequence was filmed over consecutive days in Troy, N.Y., where the set for the Scott home is located. “We got to perform it like you would a play. You got to really stay inside of the truth,” Benton says. “I feel like it served those performances.”
The resurgence of that storyline may have been a surprise for viewers who thought Peggy had put her traumatic past behind her in Season 2. “It’s the way grief works though, right?” Benton says. “You go through such extreme loss and your life still goes on. There are these ways that you compartmentalize and carry on, and then these triggers happen and you’re back on the floor like it first happened. I thought it was really beautiful to get to see Peggy so strong in the face of really unreasonable circumstances.”
1. Audra McDonald. 2. Denée Benton. (The Tyler Twins / For The Times)
Although McDonald and Benton didn’t know each other before the series, they were fans of each other’s work. When Benton was nominated for a Tony in 2017, she wrote a thank-you note to McDonald. “I remember sitting in Bryant Park and crying and being like, ‘She needs to know I would have never gotten this if it wasn’t for her.’”
McDonald says listening to Benton sing an aria from “Natasha, Pierre, and The Great Comet of 1812” inspired her to sing it. “She sang it so beautifully. And her voice was so crystalline and gorgeous.”
Like Benton and McDonald, who recently earned her 11th Tony nomination for her performance in the revival of “Gypsy,” many on the show come from the theater world, a fact that makes their set feel like a “theater rep company,” McDonald says.
“There’s not a language that needs to be learned. It’s a language we are already all speaking,” she explains. “There is an inherent sense of trust and ease, a sacred space to know that we’re here to do this work, and so there’s no egos.”
“I’m working with my actual heroes,” Benton says of the cast. “We can all pick the first thing we saw them in. All you have to do is start nerding out about some piece of art that we all love, and then all of a sudden everyone’s like 12 at theater camp and the hierarchy is completely equalized.”
This season also saw McDonald and Christine Baranski, who were co-stars on “The Good Fight,” finally share a scene when Baranski’s Agnes calls Dorothy to her house because Peggy is ill. McDonald confesses that the pair were a bit too giddy during the filming of their scenes. “We had to keep ourselves in check a little bit and remind ourselves of who we were in this world because there’s such a comfort and such a love between us.”
The third season ends on a high note for Peggy as William defies his mother and publicly proposes to Peggy as the horrified Elizabeth looks on. “Seeing Peggy get her Cinderella moment legitimized her as one of the romantic leads of the show,” Benton says. “I don’t take for granted that it would have been really easy to write a show where her character never blossomed in that way.”
What will Season 4 bring for their characters? Benton says Peggy is ready for her “Bertha era,” referring to the socially ambitious industrialist’s wife, played by Carrie Coon. “I’m excited for Peggy to become one of the great houses and just step into her power in that way.”
