More fortune in store! HBO’s historical drama, The Gilded Age, will be returning for a second season.
The series, which was renewed in February 2022, was created by Downtown Abbey showrunner Julian Fellowes and is set against the backdrop of 1880’s America amid the “Gilded Age” — a historical period of immense economic age for the country. Season 1 of the series premiered in January 2022 and follows Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) as she relocates from rural Pennsylvania to glamorous New York City to live with her wealthy aunts (Cynthia Nixon and Christine Baranski) following the death of her father.
“I [was] interested right away,” Jacobson told Vogue during a February 2022 interview about her audition. “The details I had about my character, Marian, at that stage were pretty limited. She’s described as an innocent country girl who moves to Manhattan after her father dies and leaves her penniless. She’s quite wide-eyed about the high society in which she finds herself, but there’s a boldness and a fire to her that’s slowly coming out, too.”
As Marian adjusts to living in the Big Apple, she finds herself pulled between the two worlds of modernity and her family’s old-money traditions — something her aunts are well versed in.
“One of the things about The Gilded Age that excited me most was that I would get to use [the] training I haven’t used in so long because I’ve played contemporary characters,” Baranski told Town & Country in January 2022. “Just say the words ‘Julian Fellowes [is] doing a TV show for HBO’ [and] I mean, OK, sign me up.”
In March, HBO officially announced that the second season was under production and will film in both New York and Rhode Island. “The rumors are true. #GildedAgeHBO has begun production on Season 2,” the network’s official Twitter posted alongside a photo of Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector in the Russell mansion filming a scene while crew members are gathered around them.
During The Gilded Age: For Your Consideration event on May 24, Fellowes exclusively told Us Weekly that while he’s “pleased with the way season 2 is shaping up,” he can’t promise the follow-up installment to the series is guaranteed to make all fans happy.
“When fans get involved with the characters, which is what you’re striving for, really, they will ask you to do is to make their favorite character happy,” the England native explained. “That is the request that I get. ‘Make so and so happy, make her happy, make him happy,’ and of course, if you’ve made everyone happy, there wouldn’t be much to watch. You’d just tune in to see a group of happy people having a nice time.”
The novelist added, however, that viewers being so involved with the show is overall “very rewarding” and now that he’s more familiar with the actors playing the characters on the page, the show will ultimately be more satisfying for everyone involved.
“Writing for performances you’re already enjoying and deliberately writing for actors that you now know — I have found that very enjoyable and I was on set today and yesterday and I was really thrilled.”
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