Christine Baranski wouldn’t describe herself as a snob—“I would like to think I hold myself to a certain standard. That's all,” she says—but she does play one on TV.
In The Gilded Age, a new period drama created by Julian Fellowes premiering January 24 on HBO, Baranski portrays Agnes van Rhijn, a decidedly old-money New York aristocrat with withering one-liners and a palpable sense of anxiety about how her city is changing. “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,” Agnes says in the first episode, not-so-slyly referencing her neighbors, the Russells (played by Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon), who just moved into a mansion built by, gasp, railroad money across the street.
Agnes is explaining how society works to her orphaned niece (Louisa Jacobson), who recently came to live with her and her spinster sister, Ada (Cynthia Nixon). When Ada cuts in to say “It's not quite as simple as that,” Agnes succinctly corrects her, “Yes it is.”
The Gilded Age is a story set in the past, but it’s one that feels ripe for telling right now. The sumptuous costumes, period-perfect sets, and lavish dinner party scenes offer a visual escape from the mundane Covid-tinged routine of 2022. And, in true Julian Fellowes form, it never misses a moment to explore class dynamics. Much like today, the end of the 19th century was a period of great change, and one of enormous wealth inequality. “When we were filming, [Jeff] Bezos and whoever the other one was had their rocket race to get to the moon,” Fellowes says. “And I loved that, because it just felt to me exactly what the Gilded Age people would've done if they'd had any rockets.”
Agnes, with her strict sense of social hierarchy, serves as gatekeeper to a world where money alone cannot buy a key—and while Baranski can play an imperious grande dame masterfully, it's not a role she came to naturally. “It’s funny because I'm from this blue-collar neighborhood in Buffalo. I don't know how it happened but…” Baranski says, reflecting on her habit of playing women of means. “I always wanted to play queens or ladies rather than victims. I was never good at playing victims. I was always better at playing the character of the woman who was more in command of her life.”
Perched on the edge of a vibrant couch in her New York City apartment, Baranski has a fondness in her voice. “I love Buffalo,” she tells me over Zoom. “I'm a sports fan. I lived through four years of the Buffalo Bills losing the Super Bowl. I even have a T-shirt somewhere that says, ‘Buffalo, a drinking town with a football problem.’” She had been feeling hopeful about the Bills’ chances this year—until last night's devastating overtime loss to Kansas City knocked them out of the playoffs—but she wasn’t always so keen on her hometown. “I couldn't wait to get out when I was 18. I had 12 years of Catholic school and the nuns,” she says. “Now that I'm older, and I look back, I was part of a community, a tightly-knit Polish American community with traditions.”
When Baranski was young, she shared a room with her grandmother, who had been an actress in the Polish theater. “I grew up with an Auntie Mame kind of personality. She was vivacious,” and she passed on a love of the stage to her granddaughter. Even after Baranski’s beloved father died when she was just 8, her mother scraped together $5 a week for ballet and tap lessons. “By the time I was 17 or 18, I was acting in not only plays in high school, but I got into this workshop and was doing street theater and performing with kids from all over the city. I was from a very insular kind of life. And suddenly, I was performing with Black kids and Jewish kids and it blew my world wide open.” Around that time, she read about the Juilliard School, and pinned the article to her wall, thinking: “This is where I want to go.”
When she finally applied, she was waitlisted. “I had what they call a sibilant or a thick 'S,' and they thought it was a very hard sound to correct. So I had to cap my two front teeth, and have speech therapy all summer and then re-audition,” she explains. On her second try, she was accepted. “It was so exciting to be at Juilliard at that time,” she says, remembering how she would get cheap tickets to the ballet, the opera, and the Philharmonic. “It was before Wall Street appropriated New York and turned it into a city where you couldn't afford to live. I didn't have any money and somehow I saw great things and had a wonderful time.” Four “intense” years of study at the school prepared her for a professional life on the stage, which started even before she graduated. “I didn't even attend my own graduation because I was already employed at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut.”
In the years after Juilliard, Christine made a career in New York theater, performing off and on Broadway, in original dramas, Shakespeare plays, and musicals.
Two Tony Awards later—one for her performance as Charlotte in The Real Thing, and one for her portrayal of Chris Gorman in Rumors—television came calling for Baranski, and she answered, somewhat reluctantly. “My television career started late, when I was in my 40s. I didn't really want to go into television, I wanted to stay and work in the theater, but it wasn't paying bills. The script I read was written by a man named Chuck Lorre, who's now one of the most successful men in television,” she says. It was for a sitcom starring Cybill Shepherd on CBS. Baranski's character? A “divorcée with a wicked sense of humor” named Maryann.
Now, the over-the-top, indulgent BFF with an extravagant wardrobe has become something of a trope on television (think Samantha on Sex and the City or Karen on Will and Grace) but Maryann was the original. “I think people will always be intrigued by a sophisticated, witty woman,” Baranski says. “Look at Stephen Sondheim. Look at Company, the character that Patti [LuPone] is playing, that's that woman, you know? Angry, kind of bitter, but turning it into humor and a kind of attitude about life. It's kind of a fabulous construct. I'm glad to have been the first on television to do it.”
The character also introduced Baranski to a wider audience. “It opened so many doors for me,” she says, rattling off a wide ranging list of memorable projects: The Birdcage, Bulworth, The Grinch. “That’s the great thing about my career—I never know what people will reference. So many times it's Mamma Mia or it's Diane Lockhart [from The Good Fight], or it's The Big Bang Theory. Or if I'm in New York, there are people who have seen my stage work. I love the fact that it's never any one thing.”
Audra McDonald, who has starred alongside Baranski in The Good Fight—the legal drama spin off of The Good Wife, airing on Paramount+—for five seasons, and also appears in The Gilded Age, credits her friend and colleague’s success to her work ethic and her kindness on set. “Christine is about the work,” McDonald says, emphasizing each word. “She's just as at ease playing comedic roles as she is doing dramatic roles—and she's a kick-ass singer to boot. Then she's the best gal. I mean, she really is the entire package.”
Even at 69 years old, Baranski is still having firsts. While she’s been cast in many period pieces on stage, she’d never done one for television, until The Gilded Age. “One of the things about The Gilded Age that excited me most was that I would get to use training I haven't used in so long because I've played contemporary characters.” The corsets, though, she says, “are just as uncomfortable as I remember.” But she was easily convinced to take on the part, confining underpinnings and all. “Just say the words Julian Fellowes, he's doing a TV show for HBO. I mean, ‘Okay. Sign me up.’” Fellowes was equally enthused about working with Baranski. “He actually said to me, ‘You were born to play this role.’” He had previously seen her in Reversal of Fortune—the movie dramatizing the Claus von Bulow affair—playing Andrea Reynolds. “I knew Andrea incredibly well. She was one of my early patrons in the industry, and I was very fond her,” Fellowes says. “That was my first time seeing someone I'd known very well being portrayed in a film. And I thought Christine made such a good job of it. That it had an impact on me, that an ordinary performance might not have.”
To oversimplify things, if The Gilded Age is an American version of Downton Abbey, which Fellowes also created, then Agnes serves as a parallel to the Dowager Countess, famously played by Dame Maggie Smith. “These rather WASPish, but essentially kindhearted, older women—that seems to be one of my hallmarks. In practically everything I've ever written, you'll find one of them,” says Fellowes, but he hesitates to compare Smith and Baranski outright.
“I don't know there's all that much point in comparing Maggie and Christine, except to say they're both jolly good,” he tells T&C. “But I’ll tell you what they can both do, is they can play high comedy and then one or two scenes later make you cry. They don't turn into someone else, they're true to their characters, but they can take you through that range of emotions.”
When asked about stepping into Violet Crawley’s proverbial shoes, Baranski simply says Smith “is incomparable.” “She is my favorite actress. She has been forever.” She even considers losing to Smith at the 2012 Emmys to be a “major career achievement.”
“When I found myself sitting across from the Downton Abbey people at one of the Emmy Awards, I was in Maggie Smith's category of supporting actress and I had no doubt she would win—and of course she did. She's so incredibly intelligent as an actress, and sharp and precise. There isn't anything that she's done that I wouldn't find just a masterclass.”
It was after that Emmy Awards ceremony that Baranski was first introduced to Fellowes. “When I first met Julian, I already knew that he might be doing an American version of Downton—that was a long time ago, way before it eventually materialized—and I had a chat with him about the Drexel connection,” she says.
The Drexel connection comes by way of Baranski’s late husband, Matthew Cowles, with whom she has two daughters, Lily and Isabel. She may have been from Buffalo, but Baranski married into a very old New York family.
“When I met my late husband, he was this dashing actor. I did an Ibsen play with him and he'd come to rehearsal in a black motorcycle jacket with these very eccentric glasses and shaggy blonde hair,” she says. “And I thought he was just so exotic. He asked me to take a ride home with him on the motorcycle, and I just thought, oh my god, this is dangerous and sexy. It was only slowly that I got to know him as someone who was actually raised on Park Avenue and 72nd Street.” That tony address came in part thanks to his great-grandfather, a man named Joseph Drexel, who established the New York Branch of the Drexel Banking company with JP Morgan.
“I was, of course, immersing myself in research on the Gilded Age. And I realized more deeply how connected my late husband's family had been,” she says, calling out associations with bankers, philanthropists, society women, gay men who married for money, and even a distant cousin, Catherine Drexel, who gave up her fortune to found a religious order, and would later go on to become one of the first U.S. born saints canonized by the Catholic church. “If you want to look any of these people up, you will be drawn into a rabbit hole of interest,” she tells me, matter of fact.
It only makes sense then, that the Drexels would make an appearance in The Gilded Age. “At the end of the 10th episode—I don't want to spoiler—but there's an enormous scene where the various members of society are introduced, and Julian had the Drexel family being the first people introduced at the ball,” she says.
The Gilded Age was filmed over the pandemic—“corsets and Covid” was a phrase sometimes used to describe how things were going on set—and the cast draws heavily from the New York theater community, which was shuttered for months during the height of lockdown. “It actually felt a lot like theater, doing The Gilded Age. And I say that in the best possible sense that there we were doing this play on film,” Baranski says. Denée Benton, a Broadway alum who plays Peggy Scott, an aspiring Black writer whom Agnes hires to be her secretary, even recalls Baranski humming Sondheim on set. “I would simply melt,” Benton says.
And now, the show is premiering as another wave of the virus crests in the United States. Baranski laments the fact that Omicron has spoiled the opportunity for a grand New York City premiere—“if ever there was a show that deserved a glamorous American premiere, it would be The Gilded Age”—but she sees the need for storytelling as more important than ever.
“It's helping keep us awake and keeping us human,” she says. “The news is so difficult to process, isn't it? And it comes to us off of our phones or our screen and we're bombarded with it. I think it's really hard to deeply comprehend what's going on, just how frightening it is. But I do think great actors and great writing provide people with a way of staying in touch with their humanity. It sounds very simplistic, but I think that's what performers do.”
In the top image: Brunello Cucinelli blazer ($7,995) and trousers ($6,995); Pomellato earrings ($13,700); Repossi High Jewelry ring.
Photos by Emilio Madrid. Styling by MaryKate Boylan.
Hair by Marco Santini at Walter Schupfer for Color Wow. Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo at Walter Schupfer for Benefit Cosmetics. Manicure by Megumi Yamamoto for Chanel Le Vernis. This shoot took place at The Beekman, A Thompson Hotel.
As the digital director for Town & Country, Caroline Hallemann covers culture, entertainment, and a range of other subjects
