{"id":74167,"date":"2025-08-11T07:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T07:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/74167\/"},"modified":"2025-08-11T07:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T07:54:06","slug":"the-gilded-age-producers-explain-georges-shocking-decision-in-finale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/74167\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gilded Age Producers Explain George’s Shocking Decision In Finale"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the season 3 finale of The Gilded Age<\/a> on HBO. <\/p>\n

\n\tAll\u2019s well may have ended well for the newly-hitched Gladys, but the celebration didn\u2019t last long for her mother Bertha. <\/p>\n

\n\tAfter throwing a triumphant ball that showcased the now happily-married duke and duchess and her newly-healed husband who was shot in the previous episode, Bertha would soon learn that George was in no mood to party. The railroad tycoon never got over the idea that his daughter was forced to marry someone she didn\u2019t love, so he walked out on Bertha at episode\u2019s end. <\/p>\n

\n\tHere, creator Julian Fellowes<\/a> and executive producer Sonja Warfield explain what drove George to leave his wife and why Bertha\u2019s actions toward Gladys earlier in the season shouldn\u2019t leave 21st Century viewers clutching their pearls. <\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE It seems like more than ever this season drove home the point that this period was absolute hell on women. Was that the goal all along?<\/p>\n

\n\tJULIAN FELLOWES I don\u2019t really agree with you, actually. I think that it was hell for weak women, but I think life was hell for weak women until comparatively recently. But look at women like Alva Vanderbilt and various others who were the queens of Newport and really ran the gilded age. I mean, society in most countries has always been run by women, but not any women. It\u2019s been run by these very strong and tough women, I suppose one would say. I think they were interesting characters. I mean, Alva Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman. She went through the period of wanting to be prominent socially and have her daughter be a duchess and all of that stuff. She came out the other end and got very interested in women\u2019s rights and in the Constitution and other, more serious areas, and indeed made a difference. <\/p>\n

\n\tSONJA WARFIELD I mean, if you look at where modern women are, clearly there\u2019s been growth and change.Are you referring to the fact that Aurora was shunned because she was divorced?<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE Yes, and what poor Gladys went through.<\/p>\n

\n\tSONJA WARFIELD Bertha knew what she was doing with Gladys.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE On that subject, was there a part of you that was tempted to have Gladys prevail and not marry the duke? Did you worry that a forced marriage might now resonate with 21st century audiences?<\/p>\n

\n\tJULIAN FELLOWES God knows Consuelo Vanderbilt [who her mother, Alva, forced to marry the Duke of Marlborough in 1895] did her best. I mean, how do you deal with a mother who\u2019s faking a heart attack in front of you? She was put to the ultimate test. [As she got older] the duchess chose her second husband for herself. She wasn\u2019t a fool at all. And she later wrote a rather sanitized version of what she\u2019d been put through. But nevertheless, she got involved in a lot of interesting stuff, and she was one of the big patrons of her time in different charities and different rights issues. I don\u2019t recommend Alva\u2019s behavior, and I don\u2019t think we would get away with it now. But these women, they did make a difference. Alva did made a big difference, however much it\u2019s hard to like her when you read about her and study her.<\/p>\n

\n\tSONJA WARFIELD I will tell you, we had a screening a few weeks ago, and it was the wedding episode. I went out with a group of high powered women after that episode, and we discussed it, and half of them were Team Bertha and the other half were worried for Gladys. Team Bertha said they moved mountains and done all sorts of things in the interest of their children so their children could get ahead. One of them said to me that Bertha knew exactly what she was doing and how she wasn\u2019t doing anything wrong. I believe that this season, Bertha empowered her daughter through this marriage because in 1884, that is how women had power. And then she also empowered Aurora and Mrs. Astor\u2019s daughter as divorced women by bringing them back into society.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: \u2018The Gilded Age\u2019s Carrie Coon Eyes \u201cNascent Feminist Awakening\u201d In Season 4<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tJULIAN FELLOWES She did, I mean, she really made divorce acceptable in American society 30 years before it was acceptable in Europe. That was Alva, too. I mean, she did that herself. We are an odd generation for judging earlier generations by our own standards and our own beliefs. It seems to me a completely ridiculous exercise that you must judge people in the context of their own time. It\u2019s not at all a sad story that Bertha stated\u2019s goal was to give Gladys a position from which she can have real influence and make a real difference. I don\u2019t think that was dishonest. Marrying some banker and having a weekend house in the Hamptons would not have been the same.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE Well, I did think it was a little unfair of George to leave Bertha because he still sent those checks to the Duke. He still went along with it!<\/p>\n

\n\tJULIAN FELLOWES That\u2019s what he hates himself for. He feels that she made him act against his instincts and he did it. That\u2019s what he can\u2019t forgive, of course. Bertha is more pragmatic on the whole than George. For Bertha, Gladys and the duke are happy, they\u2019re getting along, what\u2019s the problem? Everything\u2019s fine. Whereas for George, it\u2019s a deeper consideration. But what almost frightens George is that his wife has been able to manipulate him into doing something with which he completely disagrees.<\/p>\n

\n\tA lot of his robber barons, towards the end of their careers, started worrying about their lives and how they would be remembered. So they started opening art collections and giving libraries all of this stuff. And to a certain extent, it was successful. I mean, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie were among the most ruthless of the robber barons. Frick was prepared to open fire on his own workers, but now he\u2019s more or less remembered for The Frick Collection and everything else has been forgotten. I was rather interested because it chimes with certain businessmen you see today who have made enormous amounts of money. And at the end, clearly they want to be remembered for something more than that. So they give this and they give that and they sponsor the other. And you can find that quite a lot, actually, in the Gilded Age people. So we have built on that because we\u2019ve made George look at his life more searchingly after the attempt on his life.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE The death of Oscar\u2019s lover was rather grim. Why did you decide to go that route and take him out, and with a buggy, no less?<\/p>\n

\n\tJULIAN FELLOWES Well, we wanted to explore in different ways the difficulties of being homosexual in that period when it was still illegal. And of course for me, I can remember when it was still illegal when I was young. It\u2019s not long ago, any of this. And part of it was that you couldn\u2019t show grief, you couldn\u2019t show emotion. You had to keep that in a room with a closed door. There\u2019s no reason to believe that the proportion of men and women who were homosexual in 1885 was significantly different from the numbers now. It\u2019s just that most of them learned to live in hiding and to have artificial emotional lives. And I think that was the point we were trying to make.<\/p>\n

\n\tDEADLINE Can you talk about Peggy\u2019s storyline this season, especially the introduction of Phylicia Rashad and her character\u2019s discrimination against light-skinned people? <\/p>\n

\n\tSONJA WARFIELD Colorism is a big issue in communities of color, whether it\u2019s Black communities or latino communities. It\u2019s just not something that I\u2019ve ever really seen on screen. I had two grandmothers, one who was of a fair complexion and one who was of a darker complexion. They both were very concerned about how much time I spent in the sun. The idea of having light skin privilege is very much real in this country and beyond. And Elizabeth Kirkland, played by Ms. Rashad, embodies all of that. She is a bit like the Black Mrs. Astor of Newport.<\/p>\n

\n\tRELATED: \u2018The Gilded Age\u2019 Season 3 Star Morgan Spector On How George\u2019s Near-Death Experience Could Shape Season 4<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the season 3 finale of The Gilded Age on HBO.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,51072,8408],"class_list":{"0":"post-74167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-julian-fellowes","10":"tag-the-gilded-age"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}