With its ballroom doors swinging open again, HBO’s The Gilded Age returns for a third season on 22 June, carrying the story from Manhattan to Newport, Rhode Island, where filming inside landmarks such as Marble House and Rosecliff gives the resort its biggest screen role yet.
Season two’s moderate but steady audience—0.05 in adults 18-49 and 643,000 same-day viewers—convinced HBO to green-light a new run the morning after last year’s finale.
Creator Julian Fellowes and co-showrunner Sonja Warfield now explore what happens after society’s gates swing shut behind the ambitious, focusing on marriages, money and a divorce that could spell social ruin in a world where no-fault separation is still decades away.
Power shifts inside the Van Rhijn townhouse when newly wealthy Ada Brook seizes the household reins, a turn star Christine Baranski calls “a spectacular psychological shift” for her once-dominant sister Agnes.
Cynthia Nixon describes Ada as “a woman-child… suddenly thrilled by power,” while Warfield expects the siblings to swing “from throat-grabbing to hugging in a minute” this year.
Bertha and George Russell widen their sights, drawing financier J. P. Morgan (Bill Camp) into a railroad clash and sending George west in search of national leverage.
The refreshed cast also introduces Newport power couple Elizabeth and Frederick Kirkland (Phylicia Rashad and Brian Stokes Mitchell) and a medium played by Andrea Martin, while Kelli O’Hara’s Aurora Fane moves centre-stage after a scandalous divorce plea that left the actor “heartbroken in geegaws,” as she joked recently.
Peggy Scott’s courtship with a Newport doctor thrusts her into colourism inside the Black elite, continuing a storyline historians such as Erica Armstrong Dunbar say reflects a prosperous community that “had a stake in this society” during the 1880s.
Business Insider reports that screen-used estates, including The Breakers, are already seeing visitor spikes from early publicity stills, and the Preservation Society confirms fresh scenes were shot inside The Elms and Chateau-sur-Mer—a first for the series.
To capitalise on the attention, the society has launched “Inside The Gilded Age” tours timed to the premiere, turning production design into a local economic driver just as the show turns social climbing into high drama.
