The third season of HBO’s The Gilded Age is giving fans even more drama and more love stories than before, including Denée Benton’s Peggy Scott.

This season, Peggy is finally finding true love with the handsome Dr. William Kirkland, played by Jordan Donica. The two, along with the rest of the cast, talked with Blavity’s Shadow and Act about how Peggy and William’s story unfolds, as well as a scoop on some of the other drama happening this season.

Peggy finally gets the love she deserves

“Just as we see with the Russells and the Van Rhijns, we are gonna see a new generation of Black Americans rising and claiming their power and deciding for themselves who they want to love and how they want to love,” said Donica. “And I mean, I said it to Denée when we were doing ADR, and I said when we were doing it, she’s [Peggy’s] so easy to fall in love with. You know, it’s not just physically, not just the eyes, but her intellect and her brain. We’re gonna see a man who falls in love with all aspects of this person.”

Benton added that “we finally get to see Peggy openly giggle and blush.”

“It sounds so frivolous, but after seeing so much grief that Peggy’s gone through and the weight of what she’s moving through in the first and second season just as a Black femme living through the times we’re all living through, I think it’s gonna be really special to watch her feel chosen and to feel like she’s chosen for everything that she is,” she said, adding that viewers will get to see “what it’s like to see her loved for how big her dreams for herself really are, and I think that that’s sort of radical in its own way.”

Peggy’s strength and vision shine through

Benton also described how Peggy is able to keep believing in herself and her dreams despite living in a hostile time for Black Americans.

“I think one of my favorite things about Peggy is the relentless vision she has for herself,” she said. “It is almost unwavering, even in the moments that we watch her deal with the unbearable, like losing her child, losing her, her family for a time, her parents, she’s like, ‘Yes, but I have a purpose. I have a vision for myself and I’m gonna keep taking the steps towards it.’ And I think when we watch her walk away from Fortune at the end of last season, I always say she’s not walking away. She’s walking towards herself. And I think it’s beautiful that we see her find the love that she deserves from a place of choosing herself, which sounds so, you know, Eat, Pray, Love. But there’s something energetic about it…’cause I think about that question too.”

Benton continued, “My therapist asked me about it, you know, like, why is it so important to feel chosen? And I think for Peggy, we keep seeing her make these sacrifices to choose her dreams and choose herself and choose the way she needs to show up. And her eyes light up for the first time when [William] asks to read her writing. It’s something about, ‘Oh, he’s choosing what I’ve already chosen in myself and that’s why I can trust this love.’ And I think that’s beautiful.”

How Sonja Warfield brings lived experience to the writers’ room

Co-writer and executive producer Sonja Warfield also told Blavity what it’s like to work with creator/writer/EP Julian Fellowes, especially as a Black writer with so many personal ties to the lives explored in The Gilded Age.

“It’s really like nothing I’ve ever done. I mean, writing is really intimate business, and I thoroughly enjoy writing and working with Julian,” she said. “I think I’m uniquely qualified to do this job and to work with Julian because of just so sort of some things in my background. I went to this private girls schoo,l and I had a very classical education, and I was a debutante. And I come from a Black elite family in northeastern Ohio, Cleveland, in fact, where John D. Rockefeller grew up for part of his life. And so this was not an unfamiliar world to me.”

“I watched a lot of documentaries on the Vanderbilts [and] one of my favorite authors is Edith Wharton. I loved reading Edith Wharton novels,” Warfield continued. “And so I think Julian and I, there was something between us. We bonded, and it worked out. And I also spent time in England writing with him, and so I spent a lot of time with him, and he created the show. One job as a writer is to write with one voice. It’s two different people writing it, but to write with one voice and the more I got to know Julian and his voice and spend time with him, I think that really helped our process. We have [a] really quick process too. If I’m there in England visiting, we’ll talk over breakfast about something and work that whole episode out.”

Watch the full interviews with the cast of The Gilded Age, including Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Harry Richardson, Taissa Farmiga, Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon and more, above.

Denee Benton

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