On camera, Carrie Coon and her Gilded Age costars revel in the spoils of extreme wealth — spending their days planning ever-more elaborate parties, scheming how to monopolize even more industries and wearing costumes that only get more lavish as the seasons go on.
Off camera, though? “Our cast is sort of famously political,” Coon says of the New York-set series, in which she stars alongside fellow New York theater legends and outspoken actors like Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon and Audra McDonald. “It is rather hilarious that we’re the people celebrating the lives of these billionaires and playing them earnestly and without judgment. At the same time, we are railing against them anytime the press asks a question about it.”
Coon’s recent Emmy nomination is her second for the HBO period drama and fourth overall. She plays Bertha Russell on the show, the wife of the railroad tycoon — or, if you will, “railroad daddy” — George Russell (played by Morgan Spector). Ever busy, Coon, 45, is currently in the thick of production on the fourth season of The Gilded Age. She joined me on her day off for a lively, freewheeling conversation on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast, talking about everything from missing out on the cast’s on-set celebration of the New York Knicks title to the best way to spend a long flight (“why would you ever sign up for the wifi?”).
Coon went back to the set of The Gilded Age just days after wrapping up her latest run on Broadway, starring in a revival of the play Bug, written and directed by her husband, Tracy Letts. Both Letts and Coon are exceptionally in-demand actors — when I interviewed Letts last fall, he said he and Coon sit down and “do calendars” to make their schedules work while raising two kids. But it also makes New York-based The Gilded Age a gift for Coon, who lives upstate — particularly when she first joined the series in April of 2020, when it seemed unclear if Broadway could ever come back at all.
“To have theater people have jobs, that was a big deal,” the Ohio-born Coon remembers now. “There was something about being first to start back up production in the city in the middle of a pandemic, and all the protocols that were in place at that time. There was a sense of collective responsibility for one another. I think we’ve never lost that bond, and it feels very familial. We just take really good care of each other, not only the cast but also the crew.”
Taking care of your fellow man is, to put it mildly, not a primary concern for Bertha Russell. At the end of last season of The Gilded Age, she is astonished that her husband would be angry with her for forcing their daughter into a marriage with an English duke. (A marriage that, in Bertha’s defense, actually seems to be turning out pretty well.) But for all her impatience with the real-life billionaires who ran the world in the Gilded Age and do so today, Coon finds remarkable connections between the choices Bertha makes and those made by today’s influencer class.
“Because of the circumstances of women, particularly in this country right now, it feels like we’re still fighting the same battles,” Coon tells me.
To drill down further, Coon says she sees many similarities between Bertha, who makes the most of her limited world to exert the power available to her, and right-wing influencers and social media stars.
“There is something weirdly parallel about these thwarted women in these spaces, the way women are seen and the aesthetics of women in those spaces,” she says. “Their ambition still comes out. I think it’s a really interesting parallel that we haven’t talked about much.”
Hear much more from Coon on today’s episode of the podcast, which also includes a conversation between me and my colleague Christopher Rosen about the movie of the moment, The Odyssey. Is the best picture hype for Christopher Nolan’s latest actually warranted, and what kind of history would it make if it actually happened? Join us for the start of what will probably be months of speculation about that exact question.
