Did the final scene of The Gilded Age Season 3 finale also have you crashing out? Can you believe that George Russell (Morgan Spector) gave his once beloved wife Bertha (Carrie Coon) the Julian Fellowes equivalent of Rhett Butler’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” to close this season of the HBO hit? Worried that true love might not be real, the Russells are heading to divorce, and everything good is dead?
**Spoilers for The Gilded Age Season 3 Episode 8 “My Mind is Made Up,” now streaming on HBO MAX**
It’s true that The Gilded Age Season 3 ends with George shocking Bertha with the news that he is going to New York without her. Furthermore, he doesn’t know if he wants her to be in his life anymore. He explains that he only rallied for her big Newport ball for his business. Not showing might tip off competitors that he was shot, ergo vulnerable to additional attacks.
As it turns out, George is still pissed about Bertha’s role in forcing Gladys’s (Taissa Farmiga) marriage to the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb).
“Even though Gladys and the Duke have kind of found a relationship that seems to be a happy one, I think for George…I think he felt that the sort of sacred space of the family was violated in some way by Bertha’s approach to Gladys’ marriage,” Morgan Spector said. “And I think that he also feels that he really failed his daughter. He made her a promise, he did not live up to his word.”
Spector explained that no matter what we make of George, the robber baron, he still sees himself as a “man of his word” and a father who will protect his children.
“He failed to do that in this instance. So I think he can’t forgive himself and he can’t yet forgive Bertha,” Spector said.
“To summarize, he’s disappointed in himself and he’s blaming me,” Carrie Coon said.
“Yeah, I think he’s disappointed in both of you, in you and him,” Spector said.
“We all have our way of seeing it,” Coon said.
So is this it for George and Bertha Russell? Will they, like the historic Vanderbilts, get a divorce in The Gilded Age Season 4?
“Marriages evolve, everything changes, and so they can go through a difficult, challenging period in their marriage,” The Gilded Age co-showrunner Sonja Warfield told DECIDER. “Maybe they can come back together, maybe they can’t. I think that’s real and these are real, flawed, multidimensional human beings who we depict.
“I mean, the other thing to remember is that when a couple were no longer happy, assuming they’d been happy at the beginning, there were different options,” The Gilded Age co-showrunner Julian Fellowes said. “Divorce was the most extreme.”
Fellowes quoted his own creation, Downton Abbey‘s formidable Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), who told her son that their set doesn’t divorce. Rather, she says, “In that case, the couple are unable to see as much of each other as they would like.”
“That was an option for Americans, too,” Fellowes said. “You would have a house in Newport and a house in New York and a home somewhere else and very few people run around with a diary checking out who’s there together.”
“On the whole, as long as you don’t make a fuss, they won’t make fuss. So, I don’t think we’re necessarily looking at anything very seismic, but we are looking at a situation where they have to make a decision as to what it is that they want and that’s what we hope they will do.”
Spector offered a sliver of hope, though, noting, “I don’t think it’s irreconcilable, [that] the bridges are totally burned. I think it’s more like I don’t know how to be in this relationship right now and I’ve got to go be somewhere else.”
During The Gilded Age Season 3 press conference, Spector revealed an additional layer to George’s ire over Gladys’s marriage to the Duke.
“I don’t think George can really let go of the fact that there’s an implicit critique of
his own position in society that Bertha is making,” Spector said. “If you have to marry an
English aristocrat to really feel like you’ve arrived, then the sort of status that George has
built for himself isn’t enough. And I think that that’s another source of sort of tension and
unspoken friction between them.”
DECIDER asked Carrie Coon if this was the case and she emphatically said, “Not at all. I don’t think that’s ever occurred to her at all.”
“I think she’s thinking of the parallel track they’re on,” Coon continued. “She sees that other very wealthy families who are not quite entirely accepted into the old money crowd are marrying their daughters off to these English families who are desperate for the kind of wealth they can offer. That status translates into New York society.”
“She is not thinking of it globally, she’s not thinking of it personally. She is thinking that this is her purview and she is doing her part,” she said. “She doesn’t see it as a critique of George, but George has not even given her a chance to have that conversation.
At this point Spector said, “I think also, despite having really bested Mrs. Astor, she’s got a little Mrs. Astor that lives in her brain and Mrs. Astor will never be satisfied with George because the new money does not mean the same to someone like her as the aristocracy.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s a Mrs. Astor,” Coon said. “I think she just has a Bertha in her brain that’s just insatiable and will just keep doing whatever she can to get ahead.”
Sounds like there might just be hope for George and Bertha if they get an opportunity to hash it out as clearly as Spector and Coon did.