American audiences perhaps best know Julian Fellowes for his international television smash Downton Abbey. The Crawley saga ran for six seasons, receiving 69 Emmy nominations and 15 wins including two for Fellowes himself. Downton Abbey also spawned two popular feature films, the most recent being Downton Abbey: A New Era.
So, when HBO announced Fellowes’s The Gilded Age would premiere earlier this year, audiences naturally dubbed it “the American Downton Abbey.”
But that reference sells the new series far short. Yes, there are inescapable parallels between the New York-set series and Downton Abbey. Arguably, those same “upstairs/downstairs” parallels exist throughout his work, including his Oscar-winning screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. Fellowes has always been fascinated with the ruling classes and those who support them.
But The Gilded Age is far more than an Americanized take on his persistent themes. Fellowes and his creative team explore not only the rules of the American social game just before the 20th century, but they also place the action within a vast historical context. Fellowes’s Gilded Age scripts contain real-world characters interacting with fashioned amalgamations of famed Gilded Age legends such as the Vanderbilts. He references major events that shaped New York City, and the production design and costumes give us glimpses of this now-gone rarified world. The Gilded Age explores the conflicts between the old and new money of the era and the underrepresented Black middle class, going well beyond Downton Abbey‘s central themes in a uniquely American manner.
Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Julian Fellowes reveals his process in recreating this Gilded world and the extensive research he undertook. He also talks about how his series explores both the unspoken but widely accepted social power of women as well as the struggle of Black Americans during The Gilded Age.
Awards Daily: You’ve selected episode three as your 2022 Emmy submission for writing. What was it about that episode that spoke to you in terms of submission for the Emmy process?
Julian Fellowes: Well, I think a lot of The Gilded Age is very glamorous, and some of it’s quite funny. It’s quite enjoyable on that level, I hope, but it was also a time of high risk, a time of danger. People like George Russell [played by Morgan Spector] or Jay Gould or Carnegie or any of them, really, were making these enormous fortunes, and you can’t have that culture without a kind of underpinning quality of danger and risk. I felt it was the right moment to remind the audience that this was a dangerous game they were all engaged in. Of course, all the men take on George Russell, they overestimate their powers, and they underestimate his. The whole episode is really lifted from the career of Commodore Vanderbilt where they also tried to trick him. Of course, trying to trick Commodore Vanderbilt was a serious mistake, and they paid.
There were lost fortunes at that time. There were suicides and sad endings, alongside the glamorous palaces of Newport, and it just seemed right to kind of tell that story. I could have chosen [episdoe four] where Marian goes to the Scott house and took some old shoes thinking how useful she’s going to be. Of course, they’re first bewildered and then insulted, and she has completely misjudged the whole thing. Well, I thought they all turned out pretty well, actually. We were jolly lucky with the cast, not the least because Broadway was dark when we were filming. So, the whole supporting cast is basically made up of Tony Award winners. We were very, very fortunate to have Michael Engler, our director and producer who’s also very much part of the Broadway community and has directed on Broadway several times. He was the one who alerted us to the fact that we were sitting in New York, and all these brilliant actors and actresses were basically watching afternoon television because absolutely nothing was going on. I suppose you could say we took advantage of that, but I hope they enjoyed it.
AD: How did you determine, out of the richness of this history, what stories you wanted to tell during your research?
JF: I find it a very fascinating period generally. I got interested in it long before I thought it was going to be a TV show. This was just me reading books. Then, I started to realize, when I was in New York, I would go for a walk and see traces of the Gilded Age. The more I studied it, the more I felt that in this period, after the disruption of the war and the enormous fortunes that are always generated by wars, these new people arrived in New York, and they wanted to dominate society. They wanted to run it. They were a good deal richer than their predecessors before the Civil War. I saw America coming to realize that it was a powerful nation, rather like a young woman realizing she’s beautiful or a young man realizing he’s strong. That was what was happening in America. I always see it as a kind of preparation period for the century they would dominate, which was only 20 years away. I think that there is something fascinating in that America, sort of finding its muscles.
The rich before the Civil War were really living a kind of pastiche of the way it was done in Europe. There wasn’t really very much different about it, but that wasn’t true of the Gilded Age people. They they did it their way. You only have to look at Newport [Rhode Island]. Newport is a completely American construct. There’s no equivalent to that anywhere else in the world. These extraordinary palaces dotted around this harmless seaside town, and it was purely social. It was a holiday resort that was designed as a place where you changed your clothes five times a day and went to about five different entertainments. You and I would probably query whether that was a very relaxing holiday because it isn’t the way we do things now. I became very taken with it all, really.
AD: I’d like to talk about George and Bertha Russell [Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon]. In episodes two and three, George strikes out against the aldermen and takes a massive financial risk in doing so. Before doing that, though, he asks for Bertha’s approval. She responds with ‘Well, if you lose your money, then we’ll make it again.’ Talk to me about what that says about their relationship. Do you think he would have proceeded if she had said no?
JF: I think that George and Bertha have a very egalitarian marriage within the context of the 1880s. Nowadays, she would be the US Ambassador to the UN or running some vast corporation, but that wasn’t really open to women at that time. So within that context, I see their marriage as an equal marriage. I think my own belief is that, emotionally, Bertha is slightly stronger than George, and that he probably could have been talked out of it. Whereas I think if the roles were reversed, and she had made a determined decision in some way, and he said no, I’m not sure she would give in. She would say to herself, ‘I understand this, and you don’t.’ That would be her defense of sticking to her own principles.
I think the strength of their marriage is that they both talk about everything. They both want to help each other and get what they want. I think that is one of the strengths of the series really, their relationship at the heart of it. She says, ‘If you made it once, then you can make it again,’ because, for all her love of luxury and her need to be important and a leader, she’s not prepared really to be in second place to anyone. She’s very brave, and that’s why she gets what she wants. She takes a risk. In episode one, it was a risk that didn’t work for her, and she was humiliated and lost that particular battle. What you like about her is not necessarily her values, but her courage. I felt that in that moment, you saw that courage, and you saw that’s one of the things that he loves about her really.
AD: It’s courage that I would say many women in this show have. That is part of the beauty of The Gilded Age. There are a lot of women who show strength in the face of adversity even though they have no monetary power. They can’t vote, and their money passes down from husbands to sons. They have nothing except for their social status, and so they employ their power in that way.
JF: But I think their social status was quite important. The men, knowingly or not, realize that this was an area where they had no power, and the women had the power. It was true in America. It was true all over the world that society was run by women. There was nothing the men could do to change that. It wasn’t enough for a man to befriend a family or a couple. That didn’t do it. You needed a woman to get behind you and support your efforts. Bertha is prepared to play along with Mrs. Astor to get what she wants, but we already know by the end of the series that she will manipulate Mrs. Astor if she has to. Although I think she’s happy to live on good terms with Mrs. Astor, she’s no Ward McAllister. Bertha’s not going to be told what to do for very much longer, and she’s not about to hang around waiting to be given her orders. That isn’t Bertha. The obvious example was Alva Vanderbilt in the whole business of the ball where Bertha [in episode nine] blackmails, essentially, Mrs. Astor into coming. Alva Vanderbilt actually did that. These women were fighters, all of them, and I rather admire them. They created a society that was vigorous, and later, as the century moved on, the barriers around women started to fall as they were really bound to do.
AD: They’re remarkably different in terms of what they achieved and what they accomplished than the women of Downton Abbey.
JF: Yes. I think with the English training, which the women still controlled so sadly, they were sort of bred to do it more diffidently and not to chuck their power around. However, I think that the strong women helped women worldwide because they woke up men to the fact that these women were really perfectly capable. That a great deal of the restraining of women and keeping them out of everything was nonsense. Originally in America, where you were having to clear land and build log cabins and fight off Native Americans and all this stuff, naturally it was a very rugged and rather masculine culture. But even from quite early on, you get these strong women in the White House, women who were tremendous social arbiters. That began to establish a tradition of strong women, which America upholds to this day. It’s quite interesting to me that you haven’t yet had a woman president because you would have thought, of all cultures in the world, a woman president in America would seem like a natural development. I mean, like a lot of us, I thought Hillary Clinton would be your first woman president.
AD: American loves their celebrities more than they love their women. [Both laugh] I want to talk about Peggy Scott, Denée Benton’s character within The Gilded Age. There are so many wonderful moments that explore Black life within the Gilded Age, so how did you come to those moments? What kind of research did you do? What kind of information did you pull in from others collaborations?
JF: Well, it was a mixture of things really, if I’m honest. I very much didn’t want it to look like a British period drama. One way to do that was to have a Black narrative going on at the same time. I also felt that, since we were starting in 1882, which was 13 years or something since the final liberation of American slaves, somehow not to have the Black narrative would be cheating and wouldn’t be playing fair. Somebody gave me or I found for myself a book called Black Gotham [A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City], which is by Carla Peterson. She wrote this book, really, as an account of her own family, but what that account reveals in the book is that there was a substantial Black bourgeoisie in New York in the second half of the 19th century. This was a narrative that was quite new to me because I had rather accepted the more usual narrative that the Black population was trying to struggle out of slavery, trying to recover from the persecution of slavery. But there was a large, middle class Black population which I could connect to the other dramas. I didn’t want to do something completely separate. I wanted it to be embedded.
Also, what interested me is that, even with people [such as Arthur Scott, played by John Douglas Thompson] who who were prosperous running a chain of drugstores, there was still the underlying racism of the period. Clearly, the world was a racist place and some people were viciously angrily. Even when that wasn’t the case, there was still a trace of it almost everywhere, and I didn’t want us to lose that. I think The Gilded Age, like most of my stuff, is a essentially a feel good show in many ways. I think you watch it, and you enjoy it. But I didn’t want to ignore that aspect. So we have these minor reminders where Peggy goes into Bloomingdale’s with Marian, and the shop assistants shrink back and murmur to the floor manager. Peggy and her father are walking down the street, and suddenly they notice a white couple that remains stationary. They’re expected to get out of the way, and they do it. They don’t even comment on it because this is their daily life. As Peggy says, at one point when Marian says we need to fight against racism, ‘I can’t have a fight every time a cab driver doesn’t want to take me. I haven’t got space in my life for that.’ She tries to fight the important fights, support the important causes, do what she can to change things, but she can’t feel she has to have a battle five times a day. That’s what I wanted to convey, that being Black at that time was a daily uphill march. I feel it’s important for us to be aware of that, to be aware of what minorities are put through, and somehow hold it all together.
The Gilded Age streams exclusively on HBO Max.