These gilded lives see big-deal changes

By the end of the first “Gilded Age” season, Cynthia Nixon was neatly settled into her role.
She was Ada Brook (shown here, left), forever the younger and meeker one. She was living with her older sister, Agnes Brook van Rhijn (right), a widow with much money and many opinions. Ada’s just sort of went along.
Then one day, Nixon recalls, she was chatting with a director. “He started talking to me about who they were going to cast as my husband next season …. I could have fallen out of my chair.”
She was learning that “Gilded Age” isn’t one of those shows where things stay the same. That’s even more obvious, now that the fourth season (9 p.m. Sundays on HBO and HBO Max) has just begun.
Back then, the change was startling. “I felt like I knew what instrument I had been assigned in the orchestra,” Nixon recalled at a recent press session. Then “it was like I was in the string section and I was given a drum set.”
That was just the start. Now it’s almost like she’s been transported to the kazoo and tuba sections.
Ada married the Rev. Forte, a decent chap who then died, leaving her some money. Agnes lost much of her fortune when her son Oscar was swindled.
“Gradually,” Nixon said, “the world has turned upside down. One of the delightful and hilarious things we get to see this season is unhinged Agnes.”
That’s been one of many shifts and surprises, she said, with the scripts whisking people to “a place that the character would never dream, that the audience would never dream.” Consider the changes too:
— George Russell, a wealthy businessman and a doting dad. He resisted his wife Bertha’s insistence that their daughter Gladys marry a penniless duke, in order to have a title. As the tiff grew, he left home. “It’s a total re-set for George,” said Morgan Spector, who plays him. It shattered his self-image of having “the capacity to compartmentalize and be business-ruthless, but a kind and loving father at home.”
— Bertha Russell, with her insatiable push to be in charge. “I don’t imagine her ever feeling content,” said Carrie Coon, who plays her.
— Gladys Russell Vere, now the duchess of Buckingham. She’s pregnant and seems surprisingly happy. “Gladys is becoming a woman who’s commanding authority and respect,” said Taissa Farmiga, who plays her.
— John “Jack” Trotter, a picture of upward mobility. Orphaned as a boy, he was happy working as a footman for Agnes and then Ada. Then his clock invention (championed by the Russells’ son Larry) turned him into a successful businessman. Now “he enters society, with all those … sometimes aimless rules,” said Ben Ahlers, who plays him. His next steps are tentative. “He’s having to decide how much he wants to play in that space.”
— Peggy Scott, a young, Black woman in an era full of hurdles for Blacks and women. She worked as Agnes’ secretary, is newly engaged to Dr. William Kirkland and has ambitions for her journalism career. “A class of professional, working women wasn’t something that really existed widespread at that time,” said Denee Benton, who plays her. Now we see her “in her Renaissance-woman era, which is exciting.”
— And Oscar van Rhijn and Enid Turner Winterton.
He’s a closeted gay man, in a time of “huge legal and social ramifications to being found out to be gay,” said Blake Ritson, who plays him.
And she is the former lady’s maid to Bertha. She married into wealth, is now widowed and is open to another change.
Oscar, whose investment business is doing well, has suggested that they marry, but live separately. “They’re very much outsiders,” said Kelley Curran, who plays Enid, but they know how to fit in. “They can be themselves together in private, and then they can put on their public performance.”
They are symbols of a show that lets some lives transform.