Agnes van Rhijn has a humorous uphill battle in The Gilded Age Season 3, set to premiere in 2025. So says Christine Baranski, who gave a sneak preview into the upcoming season in a new interview.
The Season 2 finale of the HBO period drama saw the van Rhijn household’s rotten luck turn around, but it didn’t make the seismic shift in power less shocking for the inhabitants. Cynthia Nixon‘s Ada is now the woman of the house after inheriting late husband Luke’s (Robert Sean Leonard) fortune and Oscar (Blake Ritson) losing Agnes’ in a dirty investment scheme. Agnes will have to come to terms with her loss of power in the house, and Baranski says it’s going to make for lots of laughs in the new season, now filming in New York.
“Well, she has to cope, doesn’t she? She’s suddenly not the head of the household, which you can tell from the way Season 2 ended, that this proud haughty lady who was used to being number one is suddenly not that,” Baranski told Deadline in an interview about the Julian Fellowes series and her 16th career Emmy nomination. “So that fall from grace and that fall from power, that’s always such a delicious thing to play, and the fall of a King is just as exciting as the rise. So it makes for a lot of humor, I think, her having to eat humble pie.”
Baranski also said to expect a similar pace next season now that the pesky Season 1 exposition job is out of the way.
“It’s as eventful as Season 2,” Baranski revealed, “because Season 1 was largely establishing all those characters. It was a lot of exposition, but I think the reason Season 2 was so exciting to people is they were already invested in these characters, they knew the world of The Gilded Age and they were ready to go with the high drama. So that’s pretty much continuing into Season 3.”
The Mamma Mia star also reflected on the increased fan support to last year’s new episodes, hinting that she’d be interested in seeing the series run for another decade. “It’s amazing to me how popular and how invested the public is since the second season,” she said. “If you think about it, really, you could do this show for 10 years because it’s all American history and how this world was. America was changing so rapidly during these years. I mean, it could take you into the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just thrilling.”
Would she be down to keep playing Agnes for that long? “In a word, yes,” Baranski admitted. “It shoots in Brooklyn. She’s a magnificent character. There are all kinds of places you could take her. As I said, there’s so many narratives he could spin because it’s these characters living through a turbulent and transformative time in American history. And I love my colleagues. I adore Cynthia. I mean, she’s just the best acting pal.”
We’re game if she is! Baranski also noted similarities between Agnes and Diane Lockhart, her character on The Good Wife and The Good Fight. Diane, a character that earned Baranski six consecutive Emmy nominations, was a lawyer known for being a champion of women’s causes, as well as being driven, pragmatic, and fierce. Those are traits you could also apply to Agnes in The Gilded Age. Though Agnes is much more committed to the status quo when it comes to fraternizing with new money New York, she has progressive beliefs when it comes to women’s independence.
“I was thinking of the similarities of Diane and Agnes. The world around them, the world that they know, that they respect, that they’ve adhered to, with Diane it was the legal world, the rule of law. And the political world, the world that she believed in,” Baranski said. “You watch her struggle to keep her balance in a world where the guardrails are coming off, and it is true of Agnes.”
“The society in which she is living is changing so rapidly, and inside her own house with the arrival of her niece, who’s this young feisty woman, and her own sister,” she continued. “That’s inside her house domestically, but then her outer world, the people across the street are changing her world. And how do people like that, women like that, keep their integrity and keep their sense? How do they survive that? It’s been wonderful to play both roles for that reason.”
Baranski also shared that Diane and Agnes remind her a lot of her own mother, who was also forced by circumstance to be fiercely independent.
A casting announcement for The Gilded Age on August 12 revealed that the women’s suffrage movement will be part of Season 3. It will be fascinating to see how Agnes involves or distances herself from that movement.
The Gilded Age, Season 3 Premiere, 2025, HBO