After a decade spent as puppeteer to the passions of his Downton Abbey cast, he continues to play metaphorical matchmaker to his The Gilded Age characters, sprinkling them all with pixie dust.
Speaking on the eve of the US release of The Gilded Age’s second season, he promises much more romance and intrigue for the lovelorn denizens of Manhattan circa 1884.
“Well, you know, love is a pretty fundamental part of most of our lives. The greatest mistakes we ever make and the times we make most fools of ourselves are usually connected in some way to love. And I feel that it’s good to show your characters in love as it allows you to take them into areas where they wouldn’t normally go if they were feeling sane and sensible,” he says of the new season’s storyline, hinting that it might compensate for the broken hearts of the first season.
The American Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, and great conflict between the old ways and brand new systems, and of huge fortunes made and lost. Against the backdrop of this transformation, the first season followed the fortunes of a young Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) moving from rural Pennsylvania to New York City after the death of her father to live with her rich dowager aunts Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon).
Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between her aunt Agnes, a snooty scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbours, a ruthless railroad tycoon George (Morgan Spector) and his ambitious wife, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon).
Young and beautiful, audiences know we can count on our heroine Marian to find love eventually while, at the same time, Season 1 seemingly banished Nixon’s Ada to eternal spinsterhood.
“I don’t know if I’m really supposed to say this, but we use love in this season, in a way, to show who Ada particularly really is,” teases Fellowes.
“We have seen one side of her as the dominated and compliant sort of aide of her sister, Agnes. But there’s more to Ada than that. She has an emotional dimension that we’ve glimpsed I think at times, but never really seen, and in this season, we do see it. And I think we were very, very lucky to get the two actors we have to play their story, so I enjoyed all that.
“Of course, in drama, happiness is usually the business of a moment. Happily ever after is what comes when the drama is finished,” adds Fellowes who also scripted Carlo Carlei’s Romeo & Juliet, Jean-Marc Vallee’s The Young Victoria and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.
As The Gilded Age’s creator, producer and writer, he has devised scenes so extravagantly ostentatious, you wonder if his crew dread seeing what he’s come up with. “Well, that would make me sound ungenerous. It’s only because I have such faith in their brilliance that I dare write these scenes. Otherwise, I should hide behind the sofa,” he laughs. “But no, I think we wanted to open it up a little, show a little bit more of the whole thing this was operating in, more of the context and that kind of thing,” he says, brushing off the fact that his wardrobe department were tasked with creating a hundred ornate Easter bonnets for one fleeting easter church scene.
If Downton Abbey was pretty much white, then Fellowes has created fully formed successful black characters who are as important to the story as their privileged white counterparts.
Immersing himself in the often shameful history of the US, Fellowes has included fascinating storylines around his talented black cast including veteran actors, Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson.
“We felt it was worth mining,” he says. “I mean, in the first series we surprised people by introducing the Black elite, which is quite true, and at the beginning we were attacked. There were no such people! But, no, the historians came to our rescue, and they did exist. There was a Black elite.
“And all of that I think was quite a surprise to a lot of people. But now we feel it was time to show the context of the world and it wasn’t all Black elite and everything much nicer than we thought. There was a whole chunk of injustice and racism and horror all happening simultaneously,” he says.
As with Downton Abbey, Fellowes loves to straddle the class divide by presenting the lives of those both upstairs and downstairs.
And with Season 2, there is, in fact, an entire subplot involving the workers strikes of that era, striking for better pay and conditions – a little like what we’re seeing in the world in 2023.
“I think that was one of the things that attracted me to the idea of making a series, because I’ve been interested in The Gilded Age for a long time. But the strike thing is interesting to me because it’s sort of the other side of the robber baron story.
“On one level, there are these men with their beautiful wives smothered in diamonds in their tiaras walking into dining rooms lined with gold plates and so on and so forth. And these people, the workers who build and create all this, have no rights at all. They weren’t protected. Safety measures were too expensive, so they had no protection at all. And there was no comeback and no restrictions. These aspects make you pretty uncomfortable when you realise that people were earning their living and putting their lives at risk every day,” he says.
“I wanted to expose that in the show, and also examine it. And my own theory… as indeed the reason Queen Elizabeth would never meet Mary, Queen of Scots was because she thought she wouldn’t be able to execute her if necessary – if she knew her. So, she was determined never to know her.
“And I think that’s true in so many relations in our lives that we can deal with people as long as we don’t know them and take their emotions into account. And that’s what we explore in our strike story. But it was really based on the Homestead Strike in 1892 – which was actually eight years later.”
Ask if – 240 years later – there’s any relevance today for these characters, he argues that there certainly is. “We almost all know modern equivalents of practically every character, which is quite deliberate,” he says.
“And I think human nature doesn’t alter much. Electricity alters things, and tires, and AI, but human nature goes on pretty constant with its jealousies and rivalries and depression and threats and triumphs and all the rest of it that we witness first-hand.”
The Gilded Age Season 1 is streaming now on Paramount+
