Christine Baranski Waited a Lifetime for 'The Gilded Age'
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It’s hard to believe there was anything Christine Baranski hadn’t done in her life as an actor, but then The Gilded Age came along.
Over the course of her career, the Buffalo, New York, native has conquered seemingly every form of storytelling. Two Tony Awards and Broadway-icon status? Check. Roles in beloved movie musicals like Mamma Mia! and Chicago? Check. A decade-plus run as feminist lawyer Diane Lockhart, spanning two shows (The Good Wife and The Good Fight) and six Emmy nominations—not to mention her previous win for Cybill? Legendary.
Despite all that, Baranski tells BAZAAR.com that she had never done a period drama. So when she heard that writer Julian Fellowes was working on a show labeled the “American Downton Abbey,” she jumped at the chance. “What could be better than playing a curmudgeonly snob written by Julian Fellowes?” she says.
As said snob, the widow Agnes Van Rhijn, Baranski rules over a changing New York City, as the recently uber-rich, led by the wife of a railroad magnate played by Carrie Coon, threaten the world order established by families who first settled in New York in the 1600s. She runs her house with a firm hand, throwing caustic one-liners at her free-spirited sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) and rebellious niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson) while decked out in 1880s finery. Or, as Baranski puts it, “She’s got great clothes and great lines.”
Below, we speak with Baranski about playing the matron of old New York, singing along with Broadway legends during filming breaks, and what’s next for her longtime character, Diane Lockhart.
Were you a big fan of Downton Abbey before you got the call from Julian Fellowes to star in The Gilded Age?
I adored it. Like so many people, but particularly so many actors—and even more particularly, so many actresses—I would watch it and think how I would love to work on something like that. How I would love to be in a period costume drama that goes on, that keeps telling the story of a given group of people. I'd always look on with awe at Maggie Smith and the hats and the outfits and the attitude. I remember hearing years ago that Julian was thinking of doing an American version of Downton and thinking, Oh, my God, I would do anything to be a part of that. So this is definitely a dream come true.
You can tell that you're having so much fun being essentially the matron of old New York.
I love it. I think the more I played the role, the more I thought, Damn, she really has a good point about what's going on. The world being taken over by over-the-top displays of money and being defined by money, and people trying to buy their way into society. In her opinion, manners are going to hell, and people are crossing over in all kinds of ways that are inappropriate, and she sees that the guardrails are coming off.
I think people in many ways will relate to Agnes because we look at our own world and think, "What is going on? Things are spinning out of control." That's rather her point of view. She's quite appalled and terrified that her world is being shaken to such a degree. It really was an old-world value system for whatever you think of it, but it was built a great deal on hard work and sobriety and a kind of dignified way of behaving. She's going to hold her own and not give into it.
And now she has to deal with her more modern niece played by Louisa Jacobson. How is it playing the elder trying to rein her in?
It's such a huge opportunity for Louisa, and she's so lovely to work with. But the funny thing is, when I was acting with her, I would frighten her. On a few occasions, she would say how terrified she was with me, and I would say, "Louisa, that's my character. Me, Christine, I support you, and I adore you. This is who I have to be on camera, but please, don't be frightened. Please, don't think that's me." I think it took her a while. You get to know people as you work in between takes, and as the work goes on, you begin to speak with them. She shared a little sitting area right next to mine, so we'd share candy bars and things. I think she got over her intimidation. Cynthia could hold her own because we'd worked together, but I love the relationship with both those women.
Cynthia Nixon's character seems a bit more free-spirited, but the second that Louisa's character steps out of bounds, she's like, "We need to abide by the rules."
Yes, exactly. There's only so far you can go, and she's skirting two worlds, 'cause Agnes definitely is not crossing over. Ada is reading Dr. Freud and she's more curious about the world, but she's tiptoeing, and she doesn't want—nor does Agnes want—Marian to make the wrong move. It's a very harsh society. You make a wrong move too early and it taints your reputation. In that world, a woman's reputation was everything. Once it's gone, you cannot get it back.
When you were getting into Agnes, the character, were there any details or motivations you thought of for her backstory?
I thought a lot about what her childhood was like, because she had to leave that childhood home and get married. So I thought about what her life was like growing up. I did research as to the Livingston family, because her mother was a Livingston, and they are one of the oldest American families. Robert Livingston came in 1674. I was curious why Agnes has such a strong feeling for her roots and why she feels the way she does about old New York and holding onto that identity.
And then, I did a lot of imagining of what it was like for Agnes to have to marry a man that she didn't love, but who was going to provide financial security, not only for her, but for her sister. Also, I worked on the relationship with the brother who squandered the money.
I talk about it a lot in the first few episodes. There's a lot of exposition that I do when I'm talking to Ada, my sister, about our background and why I'm wary of having this young woman live with us. All of that anger had to be very clear in my mind. And my husband, the late Arnold Van Rhijn, I had to do some real thinking about the fact that probably, once I got married and had my son, I was left alone a lot. As Ada says in a scene to Marian, "He was not a man you'd want to be alone with." I think he was a rather terrifying figure, and cold.
Agnes has a toughness about her, but I think she had to make very hard choices as women did have to do in that age—and women are still making tough choices. But in that age, if you didn't marry into some kind of money and did not have financial security, it was a terrifying world. She had her Livingston background, and she was from the Brooks of Pennsylvania. Arnold married her for her pedigree, but the pedigree doesn't mean anything if you actually don't have money.
It's very rough to think she had to live through the entire marriage in order to be secure in the present day of the show.
That security means a lot to her. She doesn't want this niece to come in and not know the ropes, because she could tarnish not just her own reputation, but Agnes's as well. So Marian is taking a lot of risks behind Agnes's back, and Ada is kind of aiding and abetting her, but warning her too. There's a lot at stake.
I did also want to talk about the dynamic between your character and Denée Benton's [Peggy Scott], which is one of my favorite parts of the show. It's delightful when you consider the politics of the time.
It's extraordinary. It's revealed early on. The first time you see Agnes smile is after she asks Peggy, "Where did you learn penmanship like this?" And Peggy says she went to the Institute for Colored Youth. Agnes's father contributed to that institute. He championed abolition, and I even think they may have had Black people working for the family, and they were well treated. I think that Agnes and Ada grew up with empathy, and a higher form of intelligence and awareness. So when this truly lovely young woman comes in and is so gracious, Agnes is taken by her. Agnes just has a natural kind of feeling for this young woman—and it was true of me and Denée too. She genuinely likes her. She likes the fact that she's aspirational and she's working hard. She can see that her path in life is going to be difficult and she admires her strength, because she recognizes it in herself. You have to be very strong in life.
It's one of my favorite things about Julian's writing of my character. It's unexpected. Julian did a really good job by introducing Denée's character, and then her family's background. We have the great Audra McDonald playing her mother. There was so much going on in that world. It wasn't just rich people on the Upper East Side. There was such inequity in that society—talk about income inequality. The uptown/downtown nature of New York was just a harrowing discrepancy. It's wonderful that you're going to see a tapestry of characters that are trying to make their way in The Gilded Age. It's not just about all the people with the money giving balls.
Speaking of [your Good Fight costar] Audra McDonald, I was so hoping for an interaction between the two of you on The Gilded Age.
Well, you just have to stay tuned. It's too early in the narrative for me to have anything to do with her, but it remains to be seen. God knows, I'm so lucky to have Audra as my coworker in The Good Fight; it would be fun for us to also be in The Gilded Age. Honestly, it was such an embarrassment of riches with all of these theater actors. The set on any given day was people with whom I've worked. There's Nathan Lane, and Cynthia and I were in our first Broadway hit together, The Real Thing, about 37 years ago. She played my daughter. It's like an acting repertory company.
That's another thing I also really loved about The Good Wife and The Good Fight too. It's like a Where's Waldo of theater legends.
It's incredible. We have had so many Tony Award–winning actors, particularly musical comedy actors, in the courtroom. We always laugh, I mean, in between takes, sometimes people sing. Name a name, everybody's been in our show. We always say we ought to do a musical. Diane ought to have a dream where she's in a [Stephen] Sondheim musical, and we'll have all the great people, or a Christmas party or something where we all get to sing. Of course, we would never do it. Robert [King] would never cross over just for the sake of doing a stunt. It's not what he does as a writer, but, yeah, we've had just an extraordinary assortment of great talent on both shows.
Since you've been playing Diane Lockhart for a decade plus, and especially after last season of The Good Fight, which really tested her liberalism and feminism, what do you see happening next?
I don't know. I'm having a meeting with the Kings on Thursday and Friday, and it's a very good question, because, boy, she willingly demoted herself. There was no choice but for her to step down. She had to act her conscience. It's a wonderful thing about that character—she likes starting over. It's actually in the final scene between Audra and me that she's a fighter. She doesn't necessarily want to get to the corner office with the great view. She's always more about the struggle than the arrival. Like so many of us living in this crazy time, she's looking to adjust her way of thinking and adjust her politics to meet the moment. They write her as a voice and a conscience of the present time.
God knows it's been very hard for liberal feminists to live through what we've been living through for the last five years. And now with Roe v. Wade, you have to wonder, "Is Diane going to have another conversation with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and tell her, 'You should have stepped down actually. Look what has happened because you held on'?" I, Christine, think about that. I think, Yeah, she did a lot, but look at what has happened with the court being the way it is. To our astonishment, we are living through a possible reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Since you've literally done everything—film, theater, TV—do you prefer one of them in terms of the length of time that you spend with one character?
The great thing about the stage is you can finish a performance and go back the following night and work towards refining it even more. You can deepen and widen a performance. You can chisel it. I did love that aspect. When we were doing Gilded Age and I finished my 10th episode—I said this to Michael Engler, who also directs for the theater—I said, "Well, now I'm ready to start shooting." And we laughed, because it's like you don't get a lot of rehearsal, if any rehearsal, for your time on film or TV. You work alone in your apartment, you work on your lines, but you don't rehearse in terms of just saying it and living in a scene with other actors.
The wonderful thing for me about Diane is, while I don't get a lot of time to work on individual scenes, I have lived with this character for 12 going on 13 years. That becomes a wonderful gift as an actor, to really get to know your character. Time is the greatest extravagance and the greatest gift to an actor, so whatever allows me time. God willing, if The Gilded Age goes on and on, I'll have the gift of time to refine my character. I hope it will only get better.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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