‘The Gilded Age’ Season 2 Adds Laura Benanti, Robert Sean Leonard & More in Recurring Roles
How many Tony winners does it take to cast The Gilded Age? The limit does not exist! Laura Benanti and Robert Sean Leonard have been cast in recurring roles in The Gilded Age Season 2, Deadline reports. They’re just the latest additions to the already long list of Tony winners in the star-studded cast of the HBO drama.
Also joining the series are Christopher Denham, David Furr, Ben Lamb, Matilda Lawler, Dakin Matthews, Michael Braugher, and Nicole Brydon Bloom, with Rebeca Haden, who will return in an expanded recurring role. And along with the casting announcement came character descriptions that tease what’s to come in The Gilded Age Season 2 — and notice there are some new historical figures added to the list.
Benanti (Life & Beth) has one Tony win and five total nominations under her belt. She will play Susan Blane in the Julian Fellowes drama, a woman “recently widowed by a rich, dull man many years her senior,” according to the character description. Susan’s a beautiful, glamorous woman from Newport who hires Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) as her architect.
Leonard (Dead Poets Society, House) has three Tony nominations and one Tony win. He will play Reverend Matthew Forte, “a jovial, congenial man, and recent transplant from Boston” in Season 2. His Reverend Forte will be the new rector of high society’s most popular church.
Caroline Stuyvesant (Bloom, Law & Order: SVU) is a beguiling socialite Oscar van Rhijn (Blake Ritson) will try to woo. Braugher (Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird) will play Booker T. Washington, the famed educator who will give Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) and Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) a tour of his Tuskegee school. Denham (Being the Ricardos, Billions) recurs as Robert McNeil, a wealthy, mainstream, uptight banker.
Dashiell Montgomery (Furr, Bull) is Agnes van Rhijn’s (Christine Baranski) nephew by marriage. He’s wealthy, widowed, and has just moved to New York with his school-age daughter Frances. Lawler (Station Eleven) is playing Frances Montgomery, Dashiell’s naturally charming and well-mannered daughter. Lamb (A Christmas Prince) recurs as The Duke of Buckingham, a posh British nobleman new to New York who will catch Bertha Russell’s (Carrie Coon) eye as a possible match for Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga).
Matthews (Why Women Kill, Desperate Housewives) is recurring as Mr. Winterton, a very rich widower who has just married his new, young wife after a courtship so short, she hadn’t met his society friends and he is unaware of her past. And Haden (Madam Secretary) returns as Flora McNeil, briefly seen in Season 1. She lives at the top of New York society and has been raised to believe the lie that her parents deserted her.
Braugher, Denham, and Lawler are all Broadway actors. Matthews is a seasoned Broadway vet, and Furr is also a Tony nominee.
The Gilded Age Season 2 logline hints at further high society squabbles between Agnes and Bertha, plus a deeper look into Peggy’s life in Brooklyn.
“The Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, of huge fortunes made and lost, and of fierce rivalry between old money and new,” the logline says. “Nowhere is that rivalry more apparent than on East 61st Street, where Marian Brook and her thoroughly old money aunts, Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook, live opposite the stupendously rich George and Bertha Russell.”
“The Russells are both fiercely ambitious, he financially, she socially, and they are determined to reach the highest echelons of New York,” it continues. “Meanwhile in Brooklyn, Marian’s friend and confidant Peggy Scott forges her own path in the world of the Black elite. In this glittering world on the brink of the modern age, will the established rules of society prevail, or will the game change entirely?”
On April 15, The Gilded Age announced all of its Season 1 main cast will return as series regulars, except for Thomas Cocquerel as Mr. Raikes. Check out the rest of the returning cast, plus those who have been upped to series regulars, here.
The Gilded Age, Season 1, Streaming Now, HBO Max
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