Denée Benton has spent the better part of the last decade in a corset. After making her Broadway debut and earning a Tony nomination playing Natasha in Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 in 2016, she took over the role of Eliza Schuyler in Hamilton from Phillippa Soo. Now, she’s starring as Peggy Scott, an ambitious young writer in The Gilded Age, who serves as the show’s introduction to the world of wealthy Black society in 1800s New York City. But speaking with her in January, there’s nary a laced bodice in sight. Both Benton and fellow Gilded Age actress Taissa Farmiga, who plays Gladys Russell, are perched on a couch in the Town & Country office wearing comfy bathrobes and full glam, ready for the photoshoot seen here; their costar Louisa Jacobson, who plays Marian Brook, is in a nearby chair wearing a sleek jumpsuit. The scene could be something out of a modern ladies-who-lunch spa day. The three women are laughing and talking over one another, finishing each other’s sentences. They only recently wrapped filming season three of the series, which premieres this Sunday, June 22 on HBO Max, but they are eagerly catching up.

Almost immediately they start to gush about their fellow cast members, their names spilling out like a laundry list of theater icons. “We are getting to sit at the feet of legends," Benton says. “I feel like I've gotten to apprentice a masterclass of performance, getting to work with Audra [Mcdonald, who plays her mother Dorothy] and John [Douglas Thompson, her on-screen father] and Phylicia [Rashad, who joins The Gilded Age this season as the mother of Peggy’s new love interest]. Christine [Baranski] had us over and was talking about, ‘Oh, Steve Sondheim gifted me this’ and how she would take the bus two hours in and out of the city every day when she was on Broadway but also raising her kids. You're just getting gold. I've all asked them to coach me on auditions; John has coached me on a Shakespeare audition. Cynthia [Nixon] coached me on my Gypsy audition; I'm just mining them for their genius all the time.”

The comparison of The Gilded Age cast and crew to a theater company comes up multiple times in our conversation. "It's a lot of artists who care so much about what they do. That’s a luxury," Jacobson says, sharing that she’s gotten ample “life advice” from the older members of the team.

Farmiga was practically on the edge of her seat ready to talk about her own on-screen family. “My parents, my God, I am just so grateful because on the show, you kind of work in groupings, you know what I mean? And I'm very grateful that my bubble is a f****** fantastic bubble. Carrie [Coon], Morgan Spector, just incredibly intellectual people, super witty and funny, but kind. And their chemistry is so intoxicating, just like their friendship in real life and then their romance on the show. I don't feel like I have to pretend much when we're doing our family scenes,” she says, acknowledging that while most people are going to say they enjoy who they work with during press interviews, on their set, “there is this higher sense of comradery and gratitude.”

The charm of The Gilded Age is clear from the premise. Julian Fellowes, the Oscar- and Emmy-winning writer and producer known for Downton Abbey, Gosford Park, and generally shaping the way we see class on screen, brings his particular flavor of upstairs-downstairs drama to late 19th century New York City. It even features a decidedly Violet Crawley-esque character, Agnes Van Rhijn, a pillar of the city’s established upper class played by Baranski and armed with witty one-liners, a withering stare, and a healthy dose of anxiety about how her world is changing. New money, namely the Russells—a self-made railroad robber baron (played by Spector) and his wife Bertha (Coon), a fictionalized version of Alva Vanderbilt willing to do anything to push her children up the social ladder—have moved in across the street and into the previously gate-kept spaces of the city’s upper echelon tilting Agnes’s old-money worldview on its axis. “New York is a collection of villages. The old have been in charge since before the revolution. They ruled, justly, until the new people invaded,” she says in the show’s premiere episode. Therein lies the central conflict of the first two seasons.

The production is rich in all the sumptuous trappings of a luxe period piece: opulent historically accurate locations, beautiful gowns, and sparkling tiaras worn by a cadre of society ladies played by Broadway’s modern divas (think Donna Murphy, Laura Benanti, and Kelli O'Hara in addition to all the names already mentioned above), but despite the powerhouse actors filling the IMDB page for this series, the melodramatic stakes are deliciously low. After all, Agnes storming across 61st street—yes, the simple crossing of a street—is a climax viewers waited for with bated breath. As Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk put it, "Things that should be enormous do not actually matter all that much," while "Things that do not matter at all are treated like earth-shaking cataclysms." It’s best described as a campy feast for the eyes.

The first two chapters of Fellowes’s American story, which was created and written with his co-showrunner Sonja Warfield, focus on the older generation of grand dames, who are jockeying for status and power plotting out appearances on the social circuit like moves on a chess board, but season three offers a coming of age narrative for the younger generation of characters. All three women are seeking love this season, but also independence.

“We start off season one and Bertha is married and establishing herself. And so now it's time for Peggy and Marian and Gladys to make decisions about what they want for their lives, although Gladys,” Warfield says, pausing before completing her thought, “Gladys's decisions are made for her.”

Last season, Bertha set her sights on her daughter Gladys marrying a Duke, and her pursuit has only intensified. "Our children will be among the highest ranking people on earth," she says in the trailer for season three. “Marriage is a real opportunity. You can influence politics. Shape events, You can have powerful, interesting lives.” The only thing decidedly missing? Any mention of love.

Sitting in front of me, cursing and laughing with her colleagues in her true voice as opposed to a practiced period dialect, Farmiga is a far cry from the demure heiress she plays on screen, and yet, she sees the similarities between herself and her character. “Gladys reminds me of my young teen self,” she says. “The thing Gladys craves the most is freedom. It's something I craved very much when I was a teenager, and she especially craves freedom from her mother. And in the season, the manner in which she finds that freedom actually brings her closer to her mother Bertha, which is not something that was expected.”

Farmiga was perhaps an unconventional choice for the role of Gladys. Something of a modern day scream queen, she’s more known for appearing in multiple seasons of American Horror Story, and the Nun franchise than any sort of period piece. But the world of gore and jumpscares isn’t necessarily a natural fit. "I am the biggest scaredy cat," she says, “I don't like blood. I don't like fake blood. But somehow that became my niche. And then, The Gilded Age came up. It was something new. HBO is phenomenal, so I wanted to work with them on a project in a realm that I hadn't really touched before.”

With an overbearing mother, the prospect of becoming a duchess, and a storyline this season that Farmiga describes as a “wild emotional rollercoaster ride,” Gladys bears more than a passing resemblance to Conseulo Vanderbilt, one of the so-called “dollar princesses,” new-money American society women flush with cash married off to the titled-yet-broke English aristocracy. (If this sounds familiar, look only to Cora Crawley’s background in Downton Abbey.) But those with any knowledge of Consuelo’s life and her loveless marriage to the 9th Duke of Marlborough can only hope for Gladys’s sake that their stories play out differently.

Michael Kors Collection bra top and floral hand-embroidered skirt. Manolo Blahnik slingback heels. Chanel Fine Jewelry Coco Crush cuff, single earring, and rings.

In addition to expanding the roles of the Gilded Age ingenues, season three is also breaking open the world of the show, taking its characters beyond the confines of New York City, to England, out West, and back to Newport, where Peggy meets a new community of wealthy Black elites.

"I never knew anything about Black Newport," Benton says, noting that she did a talk at the Newport Society and actually got to meet the descendants of the real life people who inspired this story. “I get really emotional reactions from people who are fans of Peggy's world because it's not just a history we didn't know. It's really connected to people who are still living and breathing. And one of the most special parts of getting to do this for me is people feeling like life is being breathed into something that was their little secret, and it gets to be brought to the mainstream in a special way. So the history element has been a huge part of it for me, and validating in a lot of ways.”

It was critically important to the team behind the scenes that they get this depiction of Black history right. “It’s a community rarely seen depicted in mainstream media. Very rarely do you see Black elite wealth depicted in this time period. So it's very important for us to make that as big and beautiful as possible,” director and executive producer Salli Richardson-Whitfield says. “I felt a responsibility to the historical accuracy so that no one could ever say, ‘Oh, but that's not really real.’ And I think that that is why our audience, particularly our Black audience, has loved the show so much because it's true that this is how these people lived during this time period. And the Black community who loved this show had really taken great pride in that.”

Peggy is introduced to Newport society by way of a potential love interest, and Benton confirms that her character does have a happy ending this season—perhaps with the strapping gentleman whose arm she takes in the trailer, but that doesn’t mean she won’t face some challenges, particularly in regards to her relationship with her parents.

“So much of what your parents do is trying to keep you safe. Their version of what it means to keep you safe. And that's what Peggy goes through with her parents. But so often what keeps you safe also keeps you sheltered from your destiny,” Benton says. “So Peggy’s is definitely a story about getting free. A lot of the women I play all end up sort of being stories about getting free, which I feel like has been my journey as a woman.”

Jacobson was tight-lipped about the season ahead for Marian, teasing only vaguely that there will be a number of plot twists in store. “Things that you think are going to happen might happen, but then something else is going to really twist it up," she says.

From the beginning of the series, Marian, which was Jacobson’s first real TV role following her graduation from the Yale School of Drama, has served as something of a stand-in for the audience. An orphan who comes to live with her aunts, the aforementioned Agnes and her spinster sister (who finds late-in-life love and fortune) Ada played by Nixon in their stately Upper East Side brownstone, and discovers the moneyed world of the city for the first time. But heading into season three, Marian, like Peggy and Gladys, is navigating the expectations of both her family and the society she’s become a part of, particularly in the wake of two failed engagements. “They're all growing up and figuring out who they are as people and what they want. In particular, Marian is really on this path of exploration. You expect a woman at that time to just be looking for a husband, but she really feels that she wants something deeper in her life, something more,” explains Richardson-Whitflield. “And part of that is finding love, hopefully with Larry, but what kind of marriage does she want? So she's really exploring who she is as a full woman, which we don't really get to see in the late 18 hundreds normally.” Not only that, but she’s doing so within the public eye, an experience Jacobson is all-too-familiar with, both as an actress and as the youngest child of Meryl Streep and Don Gummer.

On Louisa: Michael Kors Collection bra top and floral hand-embroidered skirt. Manolo Blahnik slingback heels. Chanel Fine Jewelry Coco Crush cuff, single earring, and rings. On Denée: Gabriela Hearst Chandra dress. Beck earrings. Sauer Suzanne necklace. Belperron ring. Gianvito Rossi shoes. On Taissa: Lapointe fringe asymmetric top and sarong. Sportmax bandeau bra. Manolo Blahnik open toe mules. Boucheron Serpent Bohème vintage earrings, bracelet and ring. Van Cleef & Arpels Perlée diamonds duo ring, and bracelet.

“There are certain things in Marion's journey that I can relate to,” she says. “Back then, society was a very public place and the stakes were high if word got out that you f***** up two engagements. So there's a level of public pressure that women were under, and I can relate to that in some sense because of the way that I grew up and the way that I currently live. It's funny because in season one she was like, ‘I don't care what society thinks,’ but actually, I think she does discover that it is important. The optics of how you are living your life are important. And she's working through this process of building her own path that feels authentic to her and that feels meaningful to her and that aligns with her values as opposed to following the path of her aunts or the other young women in society. And I can relate to that.”

In Fellowes’s stories, the past is often present, and he tends to offer a view of history tinged with a modern perspective. But there’s no need to force parallels between the Gilded Age and today, when wealth disparity continues to be a concern. “It's a hundred years ago, but I think when you are watching two billionaires racing rockets to the moon, you realize that this is a different but a sort of gilded age,” he says.

The week this interview took place, then-president Biden warned of the U.S. becoming an "oligarchy" of billionaires. One of this season’s most-shocking storylines is particularly prescient given the current day murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare. “The Gilded Age is a period piece, but we haven't traveled that far from the same societal battles that they were fighting then that we're fighting now: the fight for equality, women's rights, people of color, for us in the queer community,” Farmiga says. “We're still going for the same thing even though it's 140, 150 years later.”

At this point, HBO has yet to confirm a fourth season of the show, but the actresses are eager to continue the story and to keep broadening the scope to include more depictions of history that isn’t well known, particularly of the queer community at this time in New York City.

“It's nice to share history that I think a lot of people haven't learned about and do it in a beautiful f****** package,” Farmiga says, and Benton agrees. “I think there are really cool opportunities for breaking the world open even more,” she says, referencing in particular the activist spaces Peggy and Marian begin to move through in season three. “What does it mean to let Oscar's world expand and what did the queer community look like? I think it would be cool to get to break down some of the respectability and the polished nature a little bit and have them move amongst the people.”

From there it’s a rapid fire brainstorm of ideas. “I think Sarah Paulson needs to be the show's first lesbian,” Jacobson suggests before diving into a potential scene at Walhala Hall, an 1890s venue, where gay couples would dance together, a shocking sight for the time. Benton mentions the first drag balls and the underground Black queer community of the time.

Given the caliber of Broadway talent in the cast, many are also pushing for a musical episode—perhaps a holiday special. "I'm just waiting personally for a musical. I don't know why we don't have it," Richardson-Whitflield says. “We have every Broadway star in existence in this show, how do we not hear them singing? I'm just waiting for my Christmas episode.” For Benton, a musical episode would be a “fantasy” come true. “Christine Baranski has to sing a cranky song as Agnes,” she suggests. Morgan Spector’s on board as well. “Give the people what they want,” he has previously said.

But Fellowes isn’t willing to commit one way or the other in terms of a musical event. “I don't think one must make any definite predictions,” he says. “Whenever you say, oh, we'll never do this or we'll never do that, you find yourself doing it about 18 months later.

On Denée: Tove Luna dress. Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti split cuff, High Tide earrings, and Tiffany Lock rings. On Taissa: Fendi Toffee Dress. Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti Bean wire necklace, Bean ear clips, and Bone ring. On Louisa: Louis Vuitton Folklore dress. Tiffany & Co. HardWear Large Link earrings, Elsa Peretti Split ring, and Tiffany Lock bangles.

In the top image: On Denée: Tove Luna dress. Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti Split cuff, High Tide earrings, and Tiffany Lock rings. On Taissa: Akris Corsage dress. Tiffany & Co. Elsa Peretti mesh scarf necklace, Bean ear clips, and Bone ring. On Louisa: Louis Vuitton Folklore dress. Tiffany & Co. HardWear Large Link earrings, Elsa Peretti Split ring, and Tiffany Lock bangles.

Denée: Hair by Geo Brian at Exclusive Artists, Makeup by Kelly Bellevue. Taissa: Hair by Brian Fisher at Forward Artists, Makeup by Gita Bass at The Wall Group. Louisa: Hair by Blake Erik at Forward Artists, Makeup by Lisa Aharon at The Wall Group. Nails by Kayo Higuchi at Bryan Bantry Agency.