‘Gilded Age’ Creators Dish on Bertha’s Triumph, Peggy’s Devastating Revelation in Spoiler-Filled Finale Recap

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the season finale of “The Gilded Age,” which premiered on HBO on March 21 and is now available to stream on HBO Max.

At last.

After all of the scheming and manipulating, the leveraging of favors and fortune, Bertha Russell has her ball. And it’s a complete and total triumph with Mrs. Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), the social doyenne that Bertha (Carrie Coon) has spent the bulk of “The Gilded Age’s” nine-episode season attempting to win over, not only attending, but bringing along the other members of the social hierarchy.

It’s the result of a risky bet by Bertha that making Mrs. Astor’s attendance contingent on her daughter Carrie (Amy Forsyth) being allowed to perform at the costume ball would pay off in the kind of visit that seemed so out of reach when we first met the Russells at the beginning of the show. Old money, it seems, has yielded to new…at least for one glorious evening. But what choice did it have? As Mrs. Astor’s key gatekeeper, Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane) bluntly informs her, at some point the elites have to invite of the nouveau rich to dinner lest they decide to say forget it and form their own society.

To break down Bertha’s big moment and other key plot twists from Monday’s season finale, Variety spoke with “Gilded Age” creator Julian Fellowes and co-executive producer Sonja Warfield about crafting such a gilded sendoff and what’s in store for season 2.

The season ends with Bertha Russell presiding over a lavish ball at her home that is attended by all of the social elites. Will her victory be short lived?

Julian Fellowes: I’m a killjoy, I fear. I never give away anything. I know you have to ask, but happily I don’t have to answer. So the answer is wait and see. But I love Bertha’s triumph. I feel like we’ve seen her earn her triumph.

Do you side with Bertha in her battle to gain social acceptance by any means necessary?

Fellowes: In that society, women were very limited as to what they could get into and have some effect on. That made society their natural playground. It was the only area where they were allowed to have influence, and they ran with it. So you get a woman like Bertha, whose brain and ambition and talents would actually qualify her for a much more interesting job in a later generation. At that time, however, if she wanted to go off and run a bank, she wouldn’t have gotten much of a hearing. In that sense, I enjoy the fact of her victory. She’s worked for it. She’s been pretty tough. She’s blackmailed Mrs. Astor and she’s done everything she could to make it happen. Now, it has happened. She was one of these women who made the world yield them some triumph when they were being denied it in so many areas.

Sonja Warfield: Bertha knew what she wanted it and she got it. I admire her. She’s ruthless, and she was going to make sure that her daughter had the proper debutante ball with the right people there no matter what it took.

Viewers seem to be enamored of the Russells as a married couple. What makes their bond so appealing?

Fellowes: What people like about the Russells is they have each other’s back. They’re very loyal to each other. They don’t really have the same ambitions. I’m sure they both like being very rich, but Bertha is not terribly involved in George’s business. She’s not that interested in his deals and his length of railroad and whether or not he’s bypassing Detroit or something on his next project. And George [Morgan Spector] is faintly amused by her social ambitions. It doesn’t bother him whether Mrs. Astor comes to their house or not. But he wants to see her get what she wants and she wants to see him get what he wants. That loyalty is the core of their marriage.

Even as Bertha basks in her triumph, Marian (Louisa Jacobson) is dealt a devastating blow when she discovers that Tom Raikes (Thomas Cocquerel) may be more status hungry than he let on. Did he ever really mean to elope with Marian? How has Tom managed to climb so high, so fast?

Fellowes: I think he was genuinely in love with her in the early days of his time in New York. It was her presence in New York that inspired him to make his dream come true, pack up his life in Doylestown and come to the city. But the problem is once you’ve gotten a taste of the life, it changes you. In society, a handsome man who talks well and has a good tailcoat can go anywhere. There’s always a shortage in society of young single men. If you talk well, if you have good manners, if you don’t look ridiculous and you don’t get very drunk, you can go anywhere. I know that. That happened to me when I was at university. But Raikes becomes exposed to a way of life that he had barely imagined. He goes to these palaces. He doesn’t want to be seduced by it. He wants to stay true to who he is, but staying true means a very hard life as a lawyer and a long time going by before he could make some money, nevermind the vast amounts he might get if he marries into wealth. It’s very difficult.

In Hollywood, I’ve seen young women arrive who were ambitious and then they get taken up by the head of a studio or a director and suddenly they are with someone who can make their dreams come true. Their old boyfriend, he was great, but he couldn’t make their dreams come true. That’s a tough position to be in. I’m not without sympathy for Raikes, but Marian is ultimately the more substantial person. In the end, she would not abandon her principles in order to make that gilded life happen. She may go to balls and dinners and rather enjoy them, but she has more of a moral backbone than he does.

Which takes us to Peggy (Denée Benton), who also receives some devastating news in the finale about her son. Is that going to become a major story arc in Season 2?

Fellowes: I never talk about next year’s plots. I apologize, but it’s an absolute rule, because it gets you into such trouble. Once, someone asked me at a sort of seminar for screenwriters if I would ever write about Robert and Cora Grantham’s early life together and how they fell in love. And I said, “Oh that’s rather a good idea. I’ll think about that.” By the time I got home it had been announced as a project. The following morning there was a casting call. So it makes me frightened.

Well, then let me ask the question in a slightly different way. What will be the impact of the revelation on Peggy and her family?

Fellowes: I can safely say that it’s a pretty big impact to discover that the child is alive. Next question.

Race is treated very differently in the show from the standard depictions of Black lives in period dramas. What went into your decision to chronicle the lives of Peggy and her family, who are affluent and part of a Black upper class living in Brooklyn?

Fellowes: I read this book “Black Gotham” by Carla Peterson, which is about her family, but also about the Black bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19th century. That was a social group that I was unaware of; they were centered in Brooklyn. A lot of people don’t realize that post-Civil War Black life was not only about released slaves trying to make a life for themselves or dealing with Jim Crow laws. There was a different group, and one that I could involve with the other characters who live on East 61st Street. I wanted very strongly for this show not to look like an English period drama. That’s what drew Sonja into the show.

Warfield: The audience has really responded, because Black people that soon after slavery are not usually depicted in this way. But those communities did exist, and historically Black colleges and universities were being built — Howard University was in existence, there were Black men in the state legislatures. Black people were doing things, and the Black press has always been prominent in the Black community. I’m from Cleveland, Ohio, and when I was growing up my parents always got a Black newspaper. In the show, I wanted to bring in [African American journalist] Thomas Fortune and see his interactions with Peggy, because there were young Black women writers like Peggy at that time.

I want to ask you about Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), because she’s so snobbish and conservative about a lot of things except race. She takes a strong liking to Peggy, and clearly values her as an employee. Why is she relatively progressive on that issue when she’s close minded about basically everything else?

Fellowes: I don’t think it’s that surprising. Agnes would have grown up in an era where a lot of people working for her and her parents would have been Black. Her own father was a patron of the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth, which is where Peggy was educated and which is a real institution. It still exists. So Agnes would not have had inveterate racist attitudes, whether Agnes would have been happy to sit down at dinner with Peggy is a different issue. We’ve tried not to take the show in areas that would be sentimental or false. She’s not free of racism in the sense that the whole world was racist at that time and indeed right into our time.

How long do they see the show going on? Could “The Gilded Age” live as long as “Downton Abbey” with spinoff movies and the like?

Fellowes: Tomorrow is as far as you can look with any authority. I love the idea of the show having a long life. That would give me pleasure. But the immediate ambition was a second series and we got one. That’s enough for now.

Warfield: Tomorrow is not guaranteed, so we’re just happy to have been renewed.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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