‘The Gilded Age’: Taissa Farmiga on How Gladys’ Loss Will ‘Cost Her Everything’

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 2, “What the Papers Say.”]

Love is costing Gladys Russell everything in The Gilded Age Season 3. Taissa Farmiga‘s character was dealt a heartbreaking blow in her attempt to get engaged to Billy Carlton (Matt Walker) in the June 29 episode of the HBO period drama. With Billy’s failure to meet the moment and stand up for his relationship with the young heiress, he just cleared the path to Bertha Russell’s (Carrie Coon) victory in her fight to marry Gladys off to Hector, Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb), who arrived back in New York at the episode’s end. And she didn’t have to do much work to make him fold. Here, Farmiga talks with TV Insider about Gladys’ heartbreak and the looming arrival of the Duke, whom she’s still determined not to marry.

The episode picked up in the panicked aftermath of Gladys’ late-night escape from the Russell house in The Gilded Age Season 3 premiere. She hadn’t elope with Billy like Bertha feared, but rather ran off to his house to try and show how serious she was about marrying Billy. Bertha wasn’t budging. Billy’s mother, Joan (Victoria Clark), tried to appeal to Bertha’s good side, assuming that she would easily come around once she saw how in love their children were. But Joan doesn’t know Bertha, and a childish act like running away from home was only going to make Bertha dig her heels in further. Later in the episode, during a benefit hosted by Aurora Fane (Kelli O’Hara, whose character is having nightmarish relationship issues of her own), Billy had the chance to ask George Russell (Morgan Spector) for Gladys’ hand in marriage.

In talks with Joan, Bertha threatened to have make Billy unemployable by banks in the city and to disinherit Gladys should she marry him, though she did not say this in front of her own family so it may have been an empty threat. George would have gladly come to Billy’s defense had he drummed up the gumption to ask for his blessing to marry Gladys. When the moment came, Billy caved out of fears of inadequacy. He willingly gave up on his pursuit of Gladys at the episode’s end in a secret meeting outside the Russell home at dinnertime. Billy broke off their relationship, breaking Gladys’ heart in the process.

The tagline for The Gilded Age Season 3 is, “Love conquers all, or costs everything.” Farmiga tells TV Insider that “Gladys definitely experiences the ‘it costs everything.'”

Karolina Wojtasik / HBO

“She tried to go after what she thought is the love of her life, and when it was time for him to stand up and speak to her father and have a bit of a backbone, Billy fails at that. I think that proves that he isn’t the the love for her,” Farmiga says.

Being only 18, Bertha is right when she says that Gladys doesn’t know much about love and society and how those things mesh (or don’t). And she’s too young to know if Billy really is the great love of her life. But Gladys is the daughter of power-hungry social climbers George and Bertha, who together pulled themselves out of poverty and into the highest echelon of Manhattan society. She possesses a natural drive to win because of that. So if Billy was what she wanted, even if it would’ve panned out to be just a passing fancy in the grand scheme of things, Billy is what she was going to get — so long as her partner was equally up to the challenge.

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“She tried to put all her eggs in that basket and say this is what I want, and it did, in the end, cost her everything, not in the way that like she gave up everything for him, but she would have. And he failed that,” Farmiga explains. “It’s just heartbreaking.”

Gladys may be more fueled by determination for independence than actual love for Billy. Farmiga explains, “Gladys just wants freedom, as any young woman in that time period who can’t really have access to much freedom. She wants to be able to make her own decisions, and for her, she thinks that means, ‘Right now, I’m saying what I want to do and that’s that.’ It’s a bit naive, it’s a bit childlike.”

The heiress will come to learn that she’s a lot more like her mother than she let herself believe, and she may end up feeling grateful for her mother’s relentlessness in a way. “Bertha’s playing a long game where she’s trying to set Gladys up on a pedestal so that she can continue to choose the things that make her happy even if the first choice isn’t the one that Gladys wants,” says the American Horror Story alum. But Gladys still can’t see how her mother is helping right now, nor can George or brother Larry (Harry Richardson).

It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for Gladys after her first heartbreak. Now, she must find another way to avoid marrying the Duke, a man she barely knows. Her father may be her last line of defense. Though there are challenges ahead, when it comes to the “love conquers all” part of the Season 3 tagline, Farmiga teases that Gladys “maybe is catching a glimpse of that towards the end of the season.”

The Gilded Age, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on HBO Max

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