“Clearly, there was no humility,” says The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes of Gladys Russell and the Duke of Buckingham’s opulent wedding. “There was no modesty. They were the top of the tree and wanted everyone to know it.”
Photo: HBO
The only thing more fearsome than Bertha Russell when she’s angry is Bertha Russell when she’s getting everything she wants. For three seasons, the formidable social striver (Carrie Coon) at the heart of The Gilded Age has fought, first for her family’s place in high society, then for her family’s place at the very top of it, with her teenage daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) the most valuable tool in her war chest. In season one, Bertha manipulated Gladys’s friendship with Carrie Astor to persuade New York’s old-money families to set foot in the Russells’ arriviste uptown mansion. In Sunday night’s “Marriage Is a Gamble,” Bertha finally succeeds in marrying Gladys off to the Duke of Buckingham, securing her a title and place in English peerage and making even the most established families in America nouveau by comparison. “What a triumph for Mrs. Russell,” Mrs. Astor comments as she takes her place in the church. “Strange, really, when you think that three years ago, none of us ever heard of her.”
For every other member of the Russell family, however, the wedding is a tragedy. George (Morgan Spector) looks grim walking his only daughter down the aisle, the bridesmaids carrying her veil three-to-a-side resemble pallbearers, and Gladys appears more like a phantom than a bride. But even a weeping wife can’t distract from the opulence of the ceremony, which “isn’t a direct copy of, but was not uninspired by,” one of the most famous weddings of the actual Gilded Age. “How were we going to be able to produce what really was the Wedding of the Century?” asks director Michael Engler. Here’s exactly how.
Many characters that make up The Gilded Age’s sprawling ensemble are fictionalized versions of real historical figures, like Mrs. Astor (Donna Murphy), Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane), and Mamie Fish (Ashlie Atkinson). The Russells are purely fictional figures, but creator Julian Fellowes modeled them among several famous Gilded Age families, especially the Vanderbilts. Gladys’s story takes inspiration from the life of Consuelo Vanderbilt, a socialite who became one of the most famous of the “dollar princesses,” American heiresses who were married off to noble English families. This transatlantic exchange gave the American elites a foothold in English society, while the crumbling noble houses gained access to vast sums of new American industrial wealth.
Consuelo’s 1895 marriage to the Duke of Marlborough was a famous one, and also famously unhappy, as she had wanted to marry Winthrop Rutherford (replaced on The Gilded Age with Billy Carlton). Consuelo’s wedding was an object of public fascination, explains production designer Bob Shaw. “There were crowds outside the church and outside of their home that today would only be similar to what you might see for Beyoncé,” he says. “They had to have a police presence at their home because the crowds would try to charge into the church.” The Vanderbilts were so adamant that no one see Consuelo’s dress before the ceremony that they constructed a white tent between the front door of their home and the carriage that carried her to the church. “We were going to do it and then decided not to in the end,” says Shaw. “It was one of those things that needed a little too much explanation. It looked like what they put in front of the house when they went to catch E.T.”
Consuelo’s wedding was so well documented that production could consult copious written accounts, illustrations, photographs, and even exact specs. “They would devote a lot of print to describing the flowers, describing what the bride wore,” says Shaw. From there, they could modify the show’s version of the wedding for time-period accuracy (Gladys’s wedding takes place a decade prior to Consuelo’s) and to suit the characters’ specific needs.
Much of the episode is spent with Gladys, who is determined to stay in her bedroom and stall for as long as possible. That tension builds right to the point she actually says “I will” at the altar, her eyes puffy from crying. The bride’s late arrival and the tears in her eyes are drawn from reality, but other elements of the story were even sadder in real life. Consuelo had actually been locked in her room by her mother, Alva, but The Gilded Age team wanted to give Gladys more agency. “Rather than make her a victim — a victim of the whole social construct of the time — she has choices to make along the way about how she wants to live, what she wants to give up, and what’s important to her,” says Engler. The episode depicts the ways these young women were, as he puts it, “assets to be negotiated” for their families, but he wanted to show how she took a role in the negotiation. “It’s not whether or not she’s going to get married,” he says. “It’s how she gets there.”
Fellowes actually sees an advantage in the position of the dollar princess. “One has to remember that American education for women was very different at that time from what was given to most European girls, who were not supposed to parade their points of view or bring up new subjects, certainly not political ones,” he says. “Englishmen, particularly the Prince of Wales, liked these American girls. He liked the fact that they had political arguments and put up a bit of a fight at dinner. An unmarried English girl was basically expected to sit there and look at her feet until someone proposed.”
The wedding dress was so heavy and big, Farmiga couldn’t move between takes. “I had to stay still. They caged me up, which helped with the performance because I felt caged, and Gladys felt caged.”
“When I hear ‘wedding,’ it’s very exciting,” says costume designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone. The first step of their process began with the script: “How does this scenario reflect the story arc of our characters?” A day wedding required more body coverage than an evening wedding, which helped reflect Gladys’s emotional state, “this reserved, guarded appearance, rather than the joy of becoming a bride,” Walicka-Maimone says. Then comes the historical research. While Consuelo Vanderbilt’s wedding was a huge source of inspiration, “there is always this discrepancy of what happened in reality and what happens in our story,” she says. The gloriously long train, for example, was based on the length of Consuelo’s real train — “I want to say it was 60 feet or something insane” — but they measured the center aisle of the church, taking into account the giant floral arrangements flanking the sides, to determine its width.
The costume team used photos of Consuelo’s wedding as inspiration for the bridesmaids’ outfits, “the army of ladies with hats and dresses and high-up necks,” but the wedding dress had to be true to Gladys. The Gilded Age’s costume department often takes inspiration from paintings of the period, and in this instance, paintings of weddings from the 1880s helped them tailor the shape and silhouette of Gladys’s dress for the time.
Walicka-Maimone and her team always try to use period-accurate fabrics, which in the case of the wedding dress would have required “a complicated combination of laces, silk, flowers.” But more than anything, it had to look right on screen. “At some point I abandoned the faithfulness of the fibers, because my obligation is to deliver cinematically the best representation of what the impression would have been,” she says. The structural demands of the dress, including the draping and little pleats, were achieved with a silicon-poly fiber so that the dress could hold up during multiple days of rehearsals and shooting. Onscreen, it actually reads silkier and whiter than real silk. “For cinematic reasons, I needed more of a sheen than real silk would give. We looked at endless swatches for the dress, and the strategy was photographing the material and figuring out what would read best for texture, sheen, and whiteness.” Even the specific shade of white was cause for much deliberation: “pure white would be too bright, and cream white would dial down.” They settled on a slightly off-white shade that wasn’t too pale and wouldn’t “descend into creams.”
Walicka-Maimone estimates that it took over a month to design the dress, and then “minimum six weeks” to actually construct it. Between the United States and Europe, hundreds of people — in-house designers and contracted craftspeople like milliners — worked on the costumes for the wedding, including the principal guests, groom, bridesmaids, and background performers. The costume team first had to design the color palette for the wedding, which then turned into “weeks and weeks of fittings with our fitting teams,” and gathering looks from past seasons to see what could be reused. Here, some costumes from a previous Easter episode were modified, but much of what we see onscreen in the wedding is totally new.
In certain cases, reusing a dress made dramatic sense for the plot, as with Bertha’s sister Monica’s (Merritt Wever) outfit. “We know that, in the story, she goes to Bertha’s closet and pulls something to be altered,” so the costume department chose a dress Bertha wore in Newport in season one. It was very busy in the front because it was designed to hide Coon’s pregnancy at the time, and has a more old-fashioned look than the other dresses in Bertha’s wardrobe. “It was a logical dress for her sister to be wearing at the wedding,” says Walicka-Maimone.
Around 60 to 70 people from the costume team were on-set on the days of the shoot; they’d start dressing background talent around 3 a.m., getting people into corsets and layers and placing their hats correctly, collaborating with the hair and makeup department, and placing flowers on Gladys’s train. Farmiga says that the wedding dress was so heavy and big, she couldn’t move between takes. “I had to stay still. They caged me up, which helped with the performance because I felt caged, and Gladys felt caged. I had something to draw on.”
Consuelo’s wedding took place at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, just up the street from the Vanderbilts’ chateau. That building burned down in 1905, but The Gilded Age team found another handsome Gothic Revival-style Episcopal church, even designed by the same architect as St. Thomas, Richard Upjohn. St. Peter’s Church in Albany became the site for the multi-day shoot, and it was up to production designer Bob Shaw to decorate it in Russell-worthy splendor. “It was a beautiful church. We didn’t do a runner in part because it just seemed such a shame to cover the beautiful marble mosaic floors that were all inlaid patterns and designs,” he says. They needed a space large enough to pull off a wedding evoking the over-the-top opulence of a family like the Russells. “Clearly, there was no humility,” says Fellowes. “There was no modesty. They were the top of the tree and wanted everyone to know it.” That would require …
Shaw explains that, if anything, Gladys’s wedding was pared down compared to Consuelo’s. “They were always trying to impress people with things that only rich people could get a hold of,” he says, including flowers that weren’t in season. “It was very surprising to look at the research and see that they had all these tropical palm trees on the altar.”
Even so, sheer volume always trumped rarity. “They would throw in so many mounds of flowers that at times it looked like chaos, and it’s not necessarily in line with what we would think was tasteful or beautiful now,” Shaw says. This sort of pulling-back is surprisingly common on the show, especially inside the characters’ homes. “The number of pieces of artwork they would have in their house would be distracting,” he adds.
His process for designing the wedding began with taking photographs of St. Peter’s from the back and drawing over them in Procreate on his iPad. Then he shared the plans with the set decorator and season-three florist Tess Casey, who determined which flowers could be real and which had to be artificial. The Gilded Age rarely uses artificial florals, but the outsized volume required for this scene, plus the multi-day nature of the shoot, meant that a larger-than-normal percentage of the flowers were fakes.
The artificial flowers were set up first, then the morning of shooting, real flowers were added in. “I can’t give you a number of how many thousands of flowers,” says Shaw. As Engler filmed scenes, the crew had to monitor takes and be ready to jump in and rearrange. “If they go in for a close up of Mamie Fish and we see that there’s an artificial flower in frame, someone would run and replace it with a real flower because we try to get the real stuff close to camera,” Shaw says. Many of the flowers adorned large, 8-by-12-foot arches that crossed the main aisle, sourced by Casey. Keeping with historical accuracy, most of the flowers were roses and carnations, and mostly white. “We think of carnations as not being anything particularly fancy now, but they were quite fond of them,” Shaw says.
There would have been even more flowers than what ended up on screen, giant swags of flowers going across from aisle to aisle, but they got in the way of a big overhead crane shot and had to be removed. A tasteful amount of palm trees at the altar got to stay.
“These people know each other and never get to see each other, so they got to spend a lot of time in the trailers together yakking, because they’re being used as extras for a couple days.”
Photo: Karolina Wojtasik/HBO
Among the hundreds of guests at the Russell wedding are main characters like Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Forte (Cynthia Nixon), as well as talent returning for the first time this season, like Kelley Curran, who plays Mrs. Turner, and Nathan Lane’s Ward McAllister. These actors have their small breakout moments as their characters mingle before the wedding, but much of the shoot required them to sit and stand in the pews in crowd shots. “If we are well-oiled as a production, we can get the most out of having these very busy people come and essentially be extras sitting in that hot church in Albany for three days, shooting a wedding scene where you might see her hat in the distance, or his mustache,” says Engler. “We try to organize it in a way that is least painful for everybody.” The flip side, he adds, is that “these people know each other and never get to see each other, so they got to spend a lot of time in the trailers together yakking, because they’re being used as extras for a couple days. They all seemed pretty happy to be there.”
“We probably ran that with her genuinely crying and the close camera on her 20 times, and I would say in 17-and-a-half of them, she was equally emotional in a slightly different way,” says Engler, describing the emotional and aesthetic high point of the episode, which is Gladys’s walk down the aisle. “The director wants to make sure the story is being told right,” adds Farmiga. “We started with super heightened ones where Gladys is bawling as she’s going down the aisle, and then Michael would come to me and say, ‘This works great, but let’s try a more muted one.’ At that time period, you’re not supposed to wear your emotions on your sleeve. You’re supposed to be put-together, even as an 18-year-old who is rebelling and saying, ‘Fuck this shit.’ She still has to abide by the etiquette rules of the time.” One of the more muted takes made it to screen.
“I’ve done a lot of horror in my career, and it’s always fun because everything is so exaggerated and extreme. This season was a bit of a horror film for Gladys, being forced into an arranged marriage with someone she didn’t love,” says Farmiga. “It was fun to play the exaggerated emotions.” The scene relies on multiple close-ups of her face, her eyes welling with tears. How did she make herself cry so much for 20 takes in a row? “I make sure to drink lots of water, because you will be surprised how quickly you run out of tears. I learned that years ago, on the American Horror Story set.”
As Gladys walks down the aisle, the camera cuts to her perspective, in a POV shot through her veil, of all the guests staring at her. Engler included the moment to “heighten her sense of disorientation.” To achieve this, Walicka-Maimone created a second, identical dupe of Gladys’s veil, only shorter. “We did a cheat, because the camera didn’t need all of those endless feet of train that were trailing behind Gladys.”
At the level of craft, writers and executive producers Fellowes and Sonja Warfield didn’t feel the need to get didactic in the script. Engler’s directorial flourishes were all his own, as were Walicka-Maimone’s costumes, Shaw’s production design, and Farmiga’s acting choices. “We’re all artists,” says Warfield. “And the last thing you want to do is tell an artist exactly what to do.”
During the vows, there’s an excruciating pause before Gladys says “I will.” It’s her final stand, the last few seconds before she verbally consents to the future she tried all season to avoid. “We played it several times. We had some long pauses. But overall, it was the same gist of, What am I fucking doing? And knowing that I have no choice,” says Farmiga. “For the audience, the pause is more, Will she/won’t she? But I think Gladys knew she was going to say yes.”
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