On a red carpet inside a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper on Monday night, the looks were loose, flowing and bare — far from the top hats and bustles of HBO’s lavish costume drama “The Gilded Age,” which was holding a world premiere ahead of the series’s fourth season that returns on Sunday.
“This is so much more comfortable than a corset,” said Carrie Coon, who wore a full, floral-pattern skirt over a sleeveless steel blue top.
Cast members including Cynthia Nixon, Audra McDonald and the comedian Jim Gaffigan, a new addition for Season 4, who plays President Grover Cleveland, laughed on the carpet as they celebrated another season of social backstabbing, cutthroat deal making, and for a few lucky characters, true love.
“They’re long days, don’t get me wrong, but it’s so much fun because of this cast,” said Nixon, who plays the soft-spoken Ada Brook, the sister of the old-money matriarch Agnes van Rhijn (played by Christine Baranski, who’s currently onstage in London in “Hay Fever” and was absent on Monday night).
The show, which premiered in 2022, follows the social and economic clashes between old money and new money families in 1880s New York City. And the issues it tackles — affordability, class privilege, labor conflict, classism, gender roles — said Coon, are many of the same ones the country is grappling with now.
“We are in a time where I think the economic stratification has finally eclipsed that of the Gilded Age, and so I think that we feel that these powerful people are in control and we fear where they might be taking the world,” said Coon, who plays the instigator of that war, Bertha Russell, who is determined to force high society to accept her family. “But it’s also a bit of a comfort to root for people like George and Bertha as outsiders, as people coming in, as disrupters.”
“Everybody knows what it’s like to look at another group of people and want to be in and not be able to get in,” said Morgan Spector, who plays the ruthless railroad baron George Russell, the husband of Coon’s character.
After heading into the theater around 7:30 p.m. to watch the first episode, cast and audience members emerged about an hour later and piled into shuttles to cover the few blocks to a lavish after-party at the Plaza Hotel. It was a last gasp before the storied Fifth Avenue hotel, an icon of city wealth and opulence that opened in 1907, closes for a restoration of its facade in January that is slated to take at least four years.
About 500 guests plucked miniature espresso mousse cakes and pistachio brandy cherry tarts from silver platters nestled among a teal top hat and copious white feathers, as many posed for photos.
In one corner of the room, a pair of women told people’s fortunes from tea leaves, while, in another, guests wrote postcards featuring locations from the show like the Metropolitan Opera House and the Astor residence in Newport, R.I.
By 9:30 p.m., most guests had ventured inside the grand ballroom, where they dined on cheese tortelloni, hummus, chicken kofta skewers and duck shawarma under a pair of gleaming gold chandeliers. A D.J. at the front of the room in a strapless gold dress and black headphones spun music like a techno mix of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” while, at the back of the room, a sketch artist drew portraits of guests in Gilded Age costumes.
Bartenders at the center of the room mixed specialty cocktails like a buzz-free Newport Rose (hibiscus tea, raspberry, rose water, lemon and club soda) from a station encircling a tree with red and gold leaves, for a crowd that included Louisa Jacobson, who plays the idealistic orphan Marian Brook. Ben Ahlers, who plays the footman-turned-inventor Jack Trotter, clutched a cocktail, looking much more at ease than his newly moneyed character.
“Our young people have grown up so much,” Nixon said. “The characters are really coming into their own, and so are the actors. ”
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