The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4 “Marriage is a Gamble” finally reveals whether or not Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) marries the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb).
Ever since the HBO show debuted in 2022, history nerds have noticed how much the Russell clan resembles the Vanderbilts, a real life robber baron clan of the period. Like Alva Vanderbilt, Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) spent fortunes trying to impress and then surpass Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), first using Mrs. Astor’s own daughter’s invitation to a ball as social leverage before spearheading the creation of the Metropolitan Opera House. What else was Alva Vanderbilt known for? Orchestrating her daughter Consuelo’s marriage to an English Duke.
So does Bertha succeed as Alva did? Does Gladys make the wedding as difficult to pull off as the real Consuelo did? Will George Russell (Morgan Spector) do anything to stop it? Here’s what went down in The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4 “Marriage is a Gamble”…
**Spoilers for The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4 “Marriage is a Gamble,” now streaming on HBO MAX**
For most of The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4 “Marriage is a Gamble,” it remains unclear if Gladys will go through with her wedding to the Duke. She keeps herself locked up in her bedroom, seemingly regretting her choice to agree to the engagement in the first place.
Taissa Farmiga told DECIDER that Gladys only agreed to marry the Duke because she was “tired of feeling shitty.” The heartbreak she suffered with Billy Carlton (Matt Walker) and the pressure she felt from society finally broke her resolve.
In The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 4, Gladys considers calling it off in a tense, but tender, scene with her father. She wonders if there’s any way out of the massive society wedding, but George explains that if she does so, her reputation will be ruined. Gladys should have spoken up earlier.
“It’s a very complicated moment for George because I think he wants to say to her like, ‘Look if you really—'” Spector said, before stopping himself.
“Actually, I think it’s unfair what he does in that scene,” Spector said. “He’s like, ‘Hey, if you want, if you’re willing to take the take the heat for this, I’ll call it all off. I’ll fix it. I’ll still be, you know, Big Papa and make it all better.”
“But he’s blown his opportunity to do that and now the only person who can really make that decision and also embarrass herself and incur huge social cost is Gladys. And he has not protected her from that.”
Gladys reluctantly goes through with the marriage to Hector, aka the Duke. The episode ends with them sailing away for England, “enjoying” their wedding night on a yacht.
“I think, at the end of the day, it was just the pressure of everybody,” Taissa Farmiga told DECIDER. “Like, there’s this societal expectation. There’s the expectation from her mother. All her friends are coming. And they talk to me, but they’re still trying to guide her along to make the decision to say, ‘Yes,’ to the marriage. Even her father is like, ‘You should have said, “No,” sooner.”
“I mean, he’s sorrowful at having put her in that position. I think he’s still trying to sort of play the good guy a little bit,” Spector said before reiterating how he really feels. “I actually don’t think it’s really fair what he does in that scene.”
Up until now, Gilded Age fans have safely assumed that Gladys is meant to be an avatar for the aforementioned Consuelo Vanderbilt. But while Gladys merely sequestered herself in her room before agreeing to walk down the aisle, the real Consuelo had to be locked in hers and kept on watch. She literally tried to run away to be with her preferred fiancé and was forced, crying, down the aisle to her Duke.
“There are about six hundred [American Gilded Age heiresses] who married into the British peerage. Some of them were happy, some of the were not, some were neither,” The Gilded Age creator Julian Fellowes told DECIDER. “So I don’t feel constrained to tell a ‘Consuelo’ story because that is the advantage of it not being Consuelo and not being Alva and not being any of them. We can use incidents of their life, but we don’t have to do the whole thing.”
Fellowes added that he hopes that The Gilded Age audience has “some sympathy” with Bertha’s plan.
“She knows she’s giving [Gladys] a position that can make her a world figure, as many of those English American Duchesses and Marchionesses achieved,” he said. “If you are wanting to get something done, you know, you couldn’t have a better send-off.”
For Farmiga, Gladys’s wedding day wasn’t quite a great “send-off,” but a moment for her to move forward with her life.
“Yeah, it was emotionally exhausting, but sometimes you have to you have to move through to find peace,” she said.
So what’s next for Gladys and the Duke? You’ll have to keep watching The Gilded Age Season 3 on Sundays on HBO and HBO MAX to find out…