Key Points
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The wedding of the century is at last upon us as Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) prepares to marry the Duke of Buckingham on The Gilded Age.
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But Gladys isn’t exactly thrilled about her fate, so much so that she walks down the aisle with tears running down her face beneath her veil.
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This mirrors the wedding of real-life heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt to the 9th Duke of Marlborough, during which she was reported to be seen weeping beneath her veil.
This article contains spoilers about The Gilded Age season 3, episode 4, “Marriage Is a Gamble.”
Here comes the bride, marching to her doom…
That was very much the vibe on Sunday night’s episode of The Gilded Age, in which Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) finally fell victim to her mother’s ambitions and walked down the aisle, escorted by her reluctant father George (Morgan Spector), to marry the Duke of Buckingham.
Even though George had promised Gladys that she could marry for love, she doesn’t fully voice her objections until Mr. Russell deems it too late to back out, leaving him no choice but to walk her down the aisle while she sobs beneath her veil.
“It’s brutal,” Spector says of the scene. “She’s keening, you know what I mean? It was very grim, honestly. Having read the end of that episode, which is crushing, and then knowing that I’m walking her down the aisle to that, it was brutal. It was awful.”
Karolina Wojtasik/HBO
Morgan Spector as George Russell in ‘The Gilded Age’
Farmiga agrees, commenting on how the episode — both the mournful walk down the aisle and the final scene where Gladys watches the Brooklyn bridge pass by the window of her berth on the ship taking her and the duke away from her home to England — marks a true low point for the Russell heiress.
“That is pretty much rock bottom,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “And the wedding night. There is just a lot that Gladys is slowly sludging through.”
The wedding scene was an exhausting sequence for her to shoot, due to Gladys’ grim emotional state. “She is completely empty and depleted in that moment,” Farmiga notes. “There’s the heartbreak from Billy still, knowing the man that she loved and was fighting for didn’t fight for her. You can imagine how s—y that feels to be; to have the person you love not meet the expectations you have from them.
“The whole world is telling her she has to do this thing that she doesn’t want to do, and it doesn’t feel right,” she continues. “Her dad says he’s on her side, but also he’s like, ‘You should have said no sooner.’ But she’s numb. She’s young. She doesn’t know how to process all of the emotional baggage that she’s going through.”
While Farmiga and Spector had to tap into a bit of an emotional numbness for the scene, the other actors who made up the wedding guests had to bear witness to Gladys’ tragedy. “It was the most moving scene to be around as a spectator,” says Harry Richardson, who plays Gladys’ brother Larry. “Taissa was so incredible falling into the emotional state of the scene. In between setups, the whole church went dead silent, and you could just hear this very beautiful wail that was happening before we ran action. Everyone in the church was just shivers for what this woman’s going through.”
For Farmiga, it just further fed Gladys’ distress. “There’s hundreds of people surrounding you, and then there’s the few familiar faces,” she explains. “I see Harry, I see Ashlie Atkinson, who plays Mamie Fish. I see certain faces that are comforting to Gladys.
“I remember every time I caught your eyes,” she says to Richardson. “I would see your smile peel off your face. Because you’re trying to be supportive. And the other audience members are like, ‘Ph, it’s a wedding, we’re happy.’ But when they actually see me walk past their aisle, you see the grief and despair this woman is in. Every time we caught eyes, it would ignite me all over again.”
However, Farmiga wanted to be sure to keep Gladys’ grief in that moment restrained to the silent tears beneath her veil. “She’s depleted,” she notes. “It’s a bit more contained at that moment. She’s cried so much. So, the crying happened as they called ‘rolling’ to get myself there — and then it was just the leftover sense of ‘I have nothing else to give.'”
Karolina Wojtasik/HBO
Taissa Farmiga as Gladys Russell in ‘The Gilded Age’
Though George walked his daughter down the aisle to save face, this wedding likely won’t mark the end of this particular argument between George and Bertha (Carrie Coon).
“She wants her daughter to have a life that has a sense of purpose and fulfillment,” Coon says of Bertha’s unrelenting insistence on this marriage. “She may be more ambitious for Gladys than she is for herself, but she has an instinct about it, and she trusts her instincts for better or for worse. What she loses sight of is not taking George into account. She doesn’t realize just how far apart they are.”
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Audiences, however, do, having watched George spend two seasons promising Gladys that he wouldn’t force her into a loveless marriage. “It really felt like this was going to be inevitable,” Spector says of the strain this places on the Russell marriage. “Because George spent the first two seasons saying, ‘You definitely can marry for love and I will protect you and make sure that happens.’ And at this point, Bertha is saying, ‘You’re definitely marrying the duke. I don’t care what you think.'”
Now that Bertha has got her way, will the ship right itself?
The Gilded Age airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly