Louisa Jacobson told PEOPLE at the Human Rights Campaign 2025 Greater New York Dinner on Feb. 1 that there are "a lot of plot twists" in 'Th
Louisa Jacobson is teasing what’s to come in the third season of The Gilded Age.
The 33-year-old actress told PEOPLE at the Human Rights Campaign 2025 Greater New York Dinner on Feb. 1 that fans of the hit HBO series should be ready for the unexpected.
“There’s a lot of plot twists,” she teased. “It’s gonna keep you on your toes.”
When asked about a favorite on-set memory, Jacobson, who plays Marian Brook on the series, shared, “A certain memory isn’t sticking out to me. It was all extraordinary.”
It’s old money vs. new money in the HBO period drama, but who’s who? You can tell by the clothes on their backs.
‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 Behind the Scenes: How Fashion Defines Each Character (PHOTOS)
by Kelli Boyle
Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey (2011-2016) [mod note: on PBS in the US], set that upstairs-downstairs series at a palatial British estate on the eve of World War I. He moved his newest costume drama Stateside to the streets of New York City. Set in the late 1800s, The Gilded Age, which has its second-season premiere on Sunday, October 29 on HBO (streaming on Max), pits the new money of railroad barons against the old money of New York society. The powerful fight for control of the city and use their wealth to measure social success. And dressing for success was its own full-time occupation.
When researching women’s fashion in 1800s New York, the show’s costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone saw one thing clearly: “Their life was a catwalk. There was this enormous excitement” when the ladies trekked the bustling, dusty streets of Manhattan. Her job was to recreate that excitement for contemporary viewers of The Gilded Age.
Fashion as a Sign of Status
Who’s doing all this promenading? Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) arrived in NYC with no money and was taken in by her aunts Ada (Cynthia Nixon) and Agnes (Christine Baranski), both living off an inheritance. Then the newly affluent Russells—headed by railroad baron George (Morgan Spector) and wife Bertha (Carrie Coon), who is determined to break into polite society—moved in across the street.
Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) and Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) head to church on Easter morning in ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 premiere. Niece Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) follows close behind (Credit: Barbara Nitke/HBO)
The frill thrills continue in Season 2, especially in a pivotal garden party scene (pictured below) that TV Insider observed being filmed in September 2022 at New York’s lavish Old Westbury Gardens estate. (Westbury House was previously home to an heir of the Phipps family, real-life Gilded Age figures whose patriarch made his fortune alongside Andrew Carnegie at his steel company.) On set was Fellowes, whose smart black suit and tie were the only dark hues around.
Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga), George Russell (Morgan Spector), and Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) step out for Easter mass in ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 premiere (Credit: Barbara Nitke/HBO)
Historically Accurate Costumes
It’s a testament to the wardrobe department that the stunning colors of the sprawling grounds nearly pale in comparison to the vibrancy of the women’s period garb. Despite the sepia-toned images in history books, Walicka-Maimone says, those bright tints are decidedly historically accurate. She has a library of more than 35,000 reference images to prove it.
“It’s shocking to our modern eye to see the explosion of color from that period,” she said. Production designer Bob Shaw (who won an Emmy for his work on Gilded Age) was present to share his creative process, which, just as Walicka-Maimone described of her own work, is “deeply steeped in history.”
Nicole Brydon Bloom joins the cast for Season 2, pictured here at the garden party with Blake Ritson’s Oscar van Rhijn (Credit: Barbara Nitke/HBO)
He does note that, when deciding between “what is correct and what feels correct,” the latter always wins. Creative liberties are taken to “build [character] histories into the costumes,” Walicka-Maimone added.
A Garden Party to Remember
Take Brit newcomers Dashiell Montgomery (David Furr) and his daughter, Frances (Matilda Lawler), for example. Nephew by marriage to Baranski’s Agnes, Dashiell requires more “toned-down” attire suitable for social outings, which contrasts with Season 1’s primarily business and formal menswear.
Aurora Fane (Kelli O’Hara) and husband Charles Fane (Ward Horton) attend the garden party in ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 (Credit: Barbara Nitke/HBO)
Dashiell must escort Frances through society in his late wife’s absence. One consideration for Walicka-Maimone: “This is a girl who doesn’t have a mother, so there’s probably extra care from all the other family members in [dressing her],” she said.
Meanwhile, Marian, who Jacobson said is “shining this season and sees herself in [younger] Frances,” will be more open to a strategic marriage. Marian’s “not necessarily cynical” after being jilted by Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) in last season’s finale, the actress continued, but the heartbreak gives her a “spice and edge.”
Don’t count out the possibility of a romance with Larry Russell (Harry Richardson), son of the railroad titan, which was teased last year. Jacobson shared: “They will definitely continue to deepen their friendship.” Old money and new money unite!
Christine Baranski Talks ‘The Gilded Age’ Season 3 & Reveals Details Of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ Season 2 In The Austrian Alps
The TGA parts below:
DEADLINE: In the finale of The Gilded Age Season 2, the moment where the tables turn and Ada (Cynthia Nixon) becomes the one effectively in charge, since she has the money now and will be paying the staff, what a moment that was for Agnes. How will she handle that going forward?
BARANSKI: Agnes’s world from day one, the arrival of her niece, the earth, the world, the ground, was always moving underneath her feet in a way that she was never on solid ground from the first episode of the first season, because of the arrival of the neighbors across the street, and then the arrival of the niece. But with Ada, with the second season, you have the person closest to me and dearest to me falling in love, getting married, moving away, and then Agnes is having to somehow rise to the occasion because I love her so much and accept that. But then I lose all my money, and she inherits money. It’s just too delicious. It’s all in one season. I don’t know how Julian packed it all in, but it was a banquet for me as an actress, because when you have a character that’s that rigid and haughty, and has such a firm sense of herself and what her world is, and you just see so many cracks occurring in her world, it’s funny, and it’s sad, and it’s very dramatic.
DEADLINE: It made me think of Diane Lockhart a little bit, because they are both women who are utterly in control of themselves and they both lose their money and carry on pulling it together. You can’t knock these women down, and I love that.
BARANSKI: You can’t, no. It’s a study. It’s funny you say that because I was thinking of the similarities of Diane and Agnes. The world around them, the world that they know, that they respect, that they’ve adhered to, with Diane it was the legal world, the rule of law. And the political world, the world that she believed in. You watch her struggle to keep her balance in a world where the guardrails are coming off, and it is true of Agnes. The society in which she is living is changing so rapidly, and inside her own house with the arrival of her niece, who’s this young feisty woman, and her own sister. That’s inside her house domestically, but then her outer world, the people across the street are changing her world. And how do people like that, women like that, keep their integrity and keep their sense? How do they survive that? It’s been wonderful to play both roles for that reason.
DEADLINE: It’s such an accolade to women throughout history because you see these characters, regardless of the period, who are essentially the steel spine of their society and their families, or the company where they work, and they are these unsung heroes that women have so often been.
BARANSKI: Yeah. I often say that I’m playing a lot of Agnes as my mother. My mother grew up in the Depression, and she actually told me they did stuff newspapers in their shoes and walked to school in Buffalo, New York, if you know Buffalo winters. And she had to walk home for lunch and eat jelly sandwiches every day for years. And she fell in love and married a man who went off to fight World War II. And when he came home, she wanted to be a homemaker and a mother, and my father died when I was eight years old. She had two kids to raise. She didn’t even know how to drive a car. She had to look for work. She had to begin her life again, like Diane, and she was one of the strongest women. She survived three different bouts of cancer. Lung cancer, breast cancer, and lymphoma, and she just went through whatever treatments she had to go through. She lived to 85, and she just played the hand she was dealt. And she was strong, and she had a great sense of humor. She was a tough old broad, and Julian loves tough old broads. He writes those women and he respects them.
[...]
DEADLINE: I know that you met Julian at an awards show and got talking about the Gilded Age as an era before this show came about.
BARANSKI: Well, I so love Downton Abbey, and I had heard somewhere in the ether of showbiz gossip that Julian wanted to do an American version. And after one of my many Emmy losses, at an HBO party, he was sitting there and I approached him. And I spoke to him about it, and I said, “I’m married to a man, my late husband, was a Drexel from the Drexel family, and that was, of course, one of the New York aristocratic Gilded Age families. I began talking to him about it, and we had the longest conversation. And I didn’t know Julian then. Talk about manifestation! All those years later I get a call saying, “Julian has written this show for HBO, and they’re offering you this.” I was the first person to be offered a role, and at the time, I was committed to The Good Fight. So, I was working for another company. I was working for CBS and Paramount Plus, and they didn’t want to share me because it meant possible overlapping. You couldn’t be the lead in one show for one network and a lead in another. They just didn’t allow that. I wrote to the head of Paramount Plus, and I said, “This is an opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve spent years of my life as an actress training to do that kind of a role and because of the nature of only filming a half a year with The Good Fight, that means I have a lot of time off. And what do I do with that time? Now I’m in the prime of my career.” Anyway, it was a very heartfelt letter and two days later they let it happen. He let me go to do both… It was just back-to-back, but it’s what I call a champagne problem. Oh my gosh, I’ve got two shows, not one.
DEADLINE: You’re shooting The Gilded Age Season 3 right now. Can you hint at all where Agnes is going?
BARANSKI: Well, she has to cope, doesn’t she? She’s suddenly not the head of the household, which you can tell from the way Season 2 ended, that this proud haughty lady who was used to being number one is suddenly not that. So that fall from grace and that fall from power, that’s always such a delicious thing to play, and the fall of a King is just as exciting as the rise. So it makes for a lot of humor, I think, her having to eat humble pie. It’s as eventful as Season 2, because Season 1 was largely establishing all those characters. It was a lot of exposition, but I think the reason Season 2 was so exciting to people is they were already invested in these characters, they knew the world of The Gilded Age and they were ready to go with the high drama. So that’s pretty much continuing into Season 3. It’s amazing to me how popular and how invested the public is since the second season. If you think about it, really, you could do this show for 10 years because it’s all American history and how this world was. America was changing so rapidly during these years. I mean, it could take you into the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just thrilling.
DEADLINE: So you would, in theory, do this for as long as Julian wants to make it?
BARANSKI: In a word, yes. It shoots in Brooklyn. She’s a magnificent character. There are all kinds of places you could take her. As I said, there’s so many narratives he could spin because it’s these characters living through a turbulent and transformative time in American history. And I love my colleagues. I adore Cynthia. I mean, she’s just the best acting pal.
DEADLINE: Right, you’ve known her forever, since you played mother and daughter on stage in The Real Thing in 1984.
BARANSKI: Yes, and all of us are all these great theater actors. I mean, you walk in the hair and makeup trailer and it’s like everybody’s won a Tony Award, or two or three. It’s delicious stuff.
TV Insider was on set of the HBO period drama in 2022. Here, Carrie Coon, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Louisa Jacobson, and Julian Fel
‘The Gilded Age’ Stars Reveal the Social Battlefronts of Season 2 (PHOTOS)
[These interviews were conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike authorization.]
Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) finally has her foot in the door of 1883 Manhattan society in HBO‘s The Gilded Age Season 2, but the door to the coveted Academy of Music remains closed. No matter. She’ll make the fledgling Metropolitan Opera the place to be instead! And that’s just one intrigue for The Gilded Age’s second season.
TV Insider was on set of Julian Fellowes‘ glamorous period drama in September 2022. There, we spoke with Coon, Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Louisa Jacobson, Fellowes, and the team behind the camera as they filmed a pivotal garden party scene on the lush grounds of Long Island’s Old Westbury estate. The former home to an heir of the Phipps family fortune, this was a perfect locale to host the series’ fictional steel magnates and their families.
George (Morgan Spector) and Bertha Russell are as hellbent to get to the top as ever in the new episodes, premiering October 29 on HBO and streaming on Max, and last season’s setbacks and victories will make them even more cutthroat. While George handles the money (and union troubles at his railroad), Bertha handles their social rise.
“George wants to be the richest and most powerful man in the country. That is his motivation,” Fellowes told journalists on set. “I personally don’t think he cares much about society, but he cares about his wife. And because she wants to be the dominating factor in New York society, he will support her in that and anything he can do to support her, he will do. That’s why I don’t think he cares if he knows a duchess or he’s having dinner with a princess. He could give a monkey’s toss about that. He just wants people to shake in the knee when he comes in the room, because he can break them just like that.”
“What I hope I’ve created in Bertha and George are one of those marriages where they both have quite separate fields of endeavor and each one of them is 100 percent supportive of the other one’s ambitions,” Fellowes continues, “so any way they can help, they will.”
The Russells aren’t the only well-off family with their eyes on the social prize. Below, the stars of The Gilded Age reveal the social battlefronts of Season 2.
The Gilded Age, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, October 29, 9/8c, HBO
This is an expanded excerpt from TV Guide Magazine’s 2023 Returning Favorites issue. For more first looks at fall’s returning shows, pick up the issue, on newsstands now. {mod note: this was shared on Tumblr here}
Instead of Vying for a Seat, Bertha Makes Her Own Table
Bertha (Coon, above, with Nathan Lane) “thrives” on the bitterness her friendship with Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy) stirs up in town, Coon says, adding, “It’s not just the other ladies who get ruffled. Mrs. Astor herself is in for a few surprises if she thinks she’s pacified Bertha by allowing her to enter society.”
When it comes to her and George’s children, Larry (Harry Richardson) and Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), Bertha has her sights set on a noteworthy marriage for her newly out daughter.
“Gladys is developing a mind of her own, much to Bertha’s chagrin. [Gladys] doesn’t always go along with what Bertha wants for her, and so we’ll see a lot of butting heads between the two of them,” Coon explains. “Larry, she doesn’t worry about. The world’s set up for Larry, but he makes some bad decisions, and it wouldn’t be like Bertha to keep her nose out of that business. She’s going to insert herself wherever she can to make sure her kids are on the right track.”
George's Past May Come Back to Haunt Him
Bertha and railroad baron husband George “are very much working in concert,” Coon says, to secure their rise, but the firing of gold-digging lady’s maid Turner (Kelley Curran) is the “monkey wrench” in their best-laid plans.
“Turner’s been dismissed, but we’ll see,” Coon warns. “That may not be the last of that lie. Bertha and George are going to have to deal with some personal issues in their marriage while they’re trying to complete this rise in society.”
Marian Searches for a Husband on Her Own Terms
Despite her money problems, Marian Brook (Jacobson) was the bright-eyed lovebird of Season 1. But being jilted by would-be husband Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) may have cast a love match out of her mind in Season 2. Nevertheless, Jacobson told us on set that Marian’s “shining this season.”
“I think she’s really stepping into herself. Having a bit of heartbreak has made her not necessarily cynical, but have a little bit of spice and edge. She’s not so timid,” she says. Timid, she’s not, but blind she may be.
Dashing neighbor Larry (Richardson) showed romantic interest in the Season 1 ender, and Jacobson says they will “continue to deepen their friendship” in Season 2 as Marian “feels relief when she’s around him.” But this former romantic may be shirking love for pragmatism like her Aunt Agnes (Baranski), much to Aunt Ada’s (Nixon) displeasure.
Agnes van Rhijn Wants Marian Married
Agnes van Rhijn experiences a tectonic shift in her relationship with sister Ada Brook.
“You’ll see a level of depth and feeling there that’s going to be quite rich,” Baranski tells TV Insider. Adds Nixon: “The power skirmishes that have been subtextual come out.”
As Marian searches for her life partner, Agnes will continue to urge her to be pragmatic, as her pragmatism saved their family from destitution after Marian’s late father squandered their family fortune.
Ada Brook Asserts Her Independence
While Nixon says that “Ada is not a rule-breaker,” the spinster will be outspoken about niece Marian not following in Agnes’ strategic footsteps when choosing a husband. Still, Ada fears Marian becoming the next Mrs. Chamberlain should she only follow her heart.
“I think [Ada’s] a person who likes to push it and try to push the envelope and sort of see what she can get,” Nixon says, “but for herself and also for her niece, she doesn’t want her to speak to Mrs. Chamberlain because there’s such a price to pay.”
As for her personal life, Ada won’t be as meek and meager this season. Her newfound independence and insistence that she can live a life separate from her sister may be what brings on that tectonic shift. Or could it be political differences as social issues, especially women’s right to vote, start to come to the surface?
