‘The Gilded Age’ Stars Talk Gladys’ Wedding & Russell Feuds to Come: ‘The Cost Is Great’

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4.]

The dreaded day arrived. Gladys Russell’s (Taissa Farmiga) wedding to Hector, Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb), was the main event of The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4, and it was far from a happy day. Gladys spent the week leading up to the nuptials arranged by ambitious mother Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) in her room in protest of her being forced into the union. Father George Russell (Morgan Spector) was against the match from the start because Gladys wanted to marry for love, but he ended up reluctantly siding with Bertha on the day of the ceremony because jilting her betrothed at the altar (or even just the day of the wedding) would kill Gladys’ reputation forever.

His support for the union was for Gladys’ own good, and Gladys eventually agreed it was the only way. Gladys was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the 18-year-old, George, and brother Larry (Harry Richardson) all resent Bertha for orchestrating this situation. The family will continue to feud moving forward now that Gladys has left for England to begin her life as a duchess (Farmiga isn’t leaving the series — Gladys’ life in England will be depicted in the season’s second half).

Bertha, meanwhile, can’t understand why her family sees this as such a bad thing. In her mind, Gladys is being given the most powerful life a woman can have. And in fairness, George and Larry’s privilege as men of means, combined with Gladys’ youth making her naïve to the limitations on women in this era, make all three of them blind to the inherent truth in Bertha’s argument. Bertha’s fatal flaw was her lack of consideration for her daughter’s feelings through all of this. While she has prepared her daughter for this moment over the years through education, she failed to nurture her through it, making the whole ordeal quick and painful.

Here, the Russell family actors from The Gilded Age tease what happens next now that they’ve passed the point of no return.

Gladys Russell’s Feelings About the Duke of Buckingham May Change

Karolina Wojtasik / HBO

Gladys’ life is changing forever. The next episodes will show her adjusting to life as the Duchess of Buckingham, and Hector’s sister, Sarah (Hattie Morahan), is going to make that very difficult. Taissa Farmiga tells us where Gladys is at emotionally after Episode 4, revealing that there are actually happy times ahead for the ingenue.

“By the middle of the season, Gladys has pretty much hit rock bottom. She’s a bit numb, she’s a bit depleted, and I think she doesn’t really know what happiness she’s searching for anymore. She feels like she doesn’t really have much of a say in her life,” Farmiga says. “That’s been the case for the past several seasons, but the second half of the season, everything burns down and then there’s the tiniest little like sproutlings that grow, and that’s Gladys’s happiness that’s just starting to pop out. Luckily, she’s fortunate to come back from the terrible blow at the middle of the season.”

That’s thanks to her father’s smart negotiating of their union. Hector will “have to work at a partnership with Gladys,” Farmiga teases. “George was really trying to make the most of the situation and try to plant the seed to resemble his own relationship with Bertha, how it’s a partnership and they rely on each other. Even though George kind of effed up in the middle of the season by not keeping his word and forcing her into their arranged marriage as well, he’s trying to fix that mistake that he feels he’s making.”

George and Bertha Russell’s Marriage Is in Jeopardy

Barbara Nitke / HBO

George and Gladys have a moving scene in Gladys’ room before the wedding where they get candid about their situation. George feels profound guilt for making his daughter go through with this, but he also tells her that if she decides to cancel the wedding after all, he’ll support her through it. Spector says that scene is the “last chance to really say, ‘I’ve blown this, but I love you and I’m here for you.'”

“On the one hand that’s very sincere and that’s all I’m really playing in that scene,” Spector adds, “but I also think George really has blown it, and he has participated in forcing Gladys into this choice that is impossible. She has to go through with it at that point otherwise she’ll be humiliated, and her mother will be humiliated. She’s not willing to do that, and George knows that. It’s a little bit disingenuous, although emotionally, it’s not at all, but I do think it is a little bit unfair in how that scene plays.”

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George and Bertha have had their disagreements before, but never one that they couldn’t work through. This rift over Gladys’ future is the first time that’s changing, and it’s destabilizing this once impenetrable bond. This trouble at home, compounded with the stress of Russell Industries being in real financial trouble due to this flailing transcontinental railroad plan, has George on edge like we’ve never seen him before.

“This rift around Gladys has really made [George] feel like they aren’t on the same page,” Spector tells us. “That’s something in a relationship that you really come to rely on, that you just see the world the same way. You may have differences, but there’s a sense that you’re going to be speaking the same language. Because of this rift with Gladys, he has a sense that maybe they’re not speaking the same language. And so as his life begins to unravel and he’s feeling actually quite vulnerable, he just doesn’t feel like they can talk about it.”

Carrie Coon says that Bertha is blind to the seriousness of her family’s displeasure over Gladys’ fate until after the wedding.

“It’s true that her relationship is very strained by what she’s doing with Gladys, but she doesn’t notice for a long time. She takes her eye off that ball,” Coon explains. “Now, to be fair, George isn’t operating at full disclosure, so she doesn’t know exactly the stakes that he’s dealing with because he’s not really telling her. One of the consequences of that is that we’ve always seen when Bertha reveals her vulnerabilities, it’s always to George, but she loses that space and she’s really spinning out and very isolated in this.”

Moving forward, “we see [Bertha] really feeling the weight of her choices that has left her really alone and friendless, and now losing a grip on her family, even though she still feels very confident that she’s right,” Coon adds. “And it even bears out that she is right, that Gladys actually maybe is in a position where she’s very well suited and will have power and influence and maybe even purpose and fulfillment. And yet the cost is great. But I don’t think she is far enough along where we meet her to understand psychologically what’s going on with George.”

“She doesn’t have all the information, and so she’s really left stymied by what has occurred because she feels like it all worked out,” Coon says. “It’s really confusing for her.”

The Gilded Age, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO