As Agnes van Rhijn in The Gilded Age, Christine Baranski embodies a New York matriarch bound by stringent class division and societal contest—something the show’s creator Julian Fellowes so famously explored within the British aristocracy in Downton Abbey. Baranski conveys both generations of painful suppression and a wry humor as Van Rhijn—a woman upholding a family legacy while supporting her sister (Cynthia Nixon), niece (Louisa Jacobson) and son (Blake Ritson).
A two-time Tony winner, an Emmy winner and 16-time nominee, here Baranski talks shooting Season 3 and reveals juicy details about her upcoming Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers with Nicole Kidman.
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DEADLINE: Last time we sat down for a proper chat was for The Good Fight. What a show…
CHRISTINE BARANSKI: Yes! Somebody was just asking me how Diane Lockhart would feel about all of the things happening in American politics. I said maybe we could have ended The Good Fight with Diane watching the first woman president be sworn in as the season finale. The Season 7 or Season 8 finale could have been a happy ending.
DEADLINE: That would have been epic. Congratulations on this latest, your 16th, Emmy nomination.
BARANSKI: I think it’s so funny, because the very first time I was nominated after 13 episodes of Cybill, I won. I remember arriving late because the traffic was so bad. I barely got in my seat. My category was up first. I won and it was just, “Oh, OK, that was easy. And then, 15 subsequent losses. I love it. But you know what? I’m actually really glad I got it over with. I know what it’s like to stand up there with the statue and the excitement of it. And at the time it was Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce who presented me with the Emmy, and I’d worked with both of them and it was all so happy. The whole thing was just exciting and happy. I was sitting behind David Letterman, and Barbra Streisand was across the aisle. There was something so exciting and wonderful about it. But I have to laugh because subsequently I’m maybe one of the biggest losers.
DEADLINE: In the finale of The Gilded Age Season 2, the moment where the tables turn and Ada (Cynthia Nixon) becomes the one effectively in charge, since she has the money now and will be paying the staff, what a moment that was for Agnes. How will she handle that going forward?
BARANSKI: Agnes’s world from day one, the arrival of her niece, the earth, the world, the ground, was always moving underneath her feet in a way that she was never on solid ground from the first episode of the first season, because of the arrival of the neighbors across the street, and then the arrival of the niece. But with Ada, with the second season, you have the person closest to me and dearest to me falling in love, getting married, moving away, and then Agnes is having to somehow rise to the occasion because I love her so much and accept that. But then I lose all my money, and she inherits money. It’s just too delicious. It’s all in one season. I don’t know how Julian packed it all in, but it was a banquet for me as an actress, because when you have a character that’s that rigid and haughty, and has such a firm sense of herself and what her world is, and you just see so many cracks occurring in her world, it’s funny, and it’s sad, and it’s very dramatic.
DEADLINE: It made me think of Diane Lockhart a little bit, because they are both women who are utterly in control of themselves and they both lose their money and carry on pulling it together. You can’t knock these women down, and I love that.
BARANSKI: You can’t, no. It’s a study. It’s funny you say that because I was thinking of the similarities of Diane and Agnes. The world around them, the world that they know, that they respect, that they’ve adhered to, with Diane it was the legal world, the rule of law. And the political world, the world that she believed in. You watch her struggle to keep her balance in a world where the guardrails are coming off, and it is true of Agnes. The society in which she is living is changing so rapidly, and inside her own house with the arrival of her niece, who’s this young feisty woman, and her own sister. That’s inside her house domestically, but then her outer world, the people across the street are changing her world. And how do people like that, women like that, keep their integrity and keep their sense? How do they survive that? It’s been wonderful to play both roles for that reason.
DEADLINE: It’s such an accolade to women throughout history because you see these characters, regardless of the period, who are essentially the steel spine of their society and their families, or the company where they work, and they are these unsung heroes that women have so often been.
BARANSKI: Yeah. I often say that I’m playing a lot of Agnes as my mother. My mother grew up in the Depression, and she actually told me they did stuff newspapers in their shoes and walked to school in Buffalo, New York, if you know Buffalo winters. And she had to walk home for lunch and eat jelly sandwiches every day for years. And she fell in love and married a man who went off to fight World War II. And when he came home, she wanted to be a homemaker and a mother, and my father died when I was eight years old. She had two kids to raise. She didn’t even know how to drive a car. She had to look for work. She had to begin her life again, like Diane, and she was one of the strongest women. She survived three different bouts of cancer. Lung cancer, breast cancer, and lymphoma, and she just went through whatever treatments she had to go through. She lived to 85, and she just played the hand she was dealt. And she was strong, and she had a great sense of humor. She was a tough old broad, and Julian loves tough old broads. He writes those women and he respects them.
DEADLINE: Isn’t it funny that, given your own mother’s experience, you’ve ended up playing women like her? Isn’t that strange how that happens?
BARANSKI: I know, because I didn’t necessarily manifest it. In high school I wanted to be a great theater actress, and of course, the roles that attracted me were those great ladies, those great female characters in Chekhov or in Shakespeare. I never much liked playing the victim, or the ingenue. It was always more the forward motion, strong characters. I’m delighted to have played all those kinds of ladies. It suits me just fine.
DEADLINE: I know that you met Julian at an awards show and got talking about the Gilded Age as an era before this show came about.
BARANSKI: Well, I so love Downton Abbey, and I had heard somewhere in the ether of showbiz gossip that Julian wanted to do an American version. And after one of my many Emmy losses, at an HBO party, he was sitting there and I approached him. And I spoke to him about it, and I said, “I’m married to a man, my late husband, was a Drexel from the Drexel family, and that was, of course, one of the New York aristocratic Gilded Age families. I began talking to him about it, and we had the longest conversation. And I didn’t know Julian then. Talk about manifestation! All those years later I get a call saying, “Julian has written this show for HBO, and they’re offering you this.” I was the first person to be offered a role, and at the time, I was committed to The Good Fight. So, I was working for another company. I was working for CBS and Paramount Plus, and they didn’t want to share me because it meant possible overlapping. You couldn’t be the lead in one show for one network and a lead in another. They just didn’t allow that. I wrote to the head of Paramount Plus, and I said, “This is an opportunity of a lifetime. I’ve spent years of my life as an actress training to do that kind of a role and because of the nature of only filming a half a year with The Good Fight, that means I have a lot of time off. And what do I do with that time? Now I’m in the prime of my career.” Anyway, it was a very heartfelt letter and two days later they let it happen. He let me go to do both… It was just back-to-back, but it’s what I call a champagne problem. Oh my gosh, I’ve got two shows, not one.
DEADLINE: You’re shooting The Gilded Age Season 3 right now. Can you hint at all where Agnes is going?
BARANSKI: Well, she has to cope, doesn’t she? She’s suddenly not the head of the household, which you can tell from the way Season 2 ended, that this proud haughty lady who was used to being number one is suddenly not that. So that fall from grace and that fall from power, that’s always such a delicious thing to play, and the fall of a King is just as exciting as the rise. So it makes for a lot of humor, I think, her having to eat humble pie. It’s as eventful as Season 2, because Season 1 was largely establishing all those characters. It was a lot of exposition, but I think the reason Season 2 was so exciting to people is they were already invested in these characters, they knew the world of The Gilded Age and they were ready to go with the high drama. So that’s pretty much continuing into Season 3. It’s amazing to me how popular and how invested the public is since the second season. If you think about it, really, you could do this show for 10 years because it’s all American history and how this world was. America was changing so rapidly during these years. I mean, it could take you into the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just thrilling.
DEADLINE: So you would, in theory, do this for as long as Julian wants to make it?
BARANSKI: In a word, yes. It shoots in Brooklyn. She’s a magnificent character. There are all kinds of places you could take her. As I said, there’s so many narratives he could spin because it’s these characters living through a turbulent and transformative time in American history. And I love my colleagues. I adore Cynthia. I mean, she’s just the best acting pal.
DEADLINE: Right, you’ve known her forever, since you played mother and daughter on stage in The Real Thing in 1984.
BARANSKI: Yes, and all of us are all these great theater actors. I mean, you walk in the hair and makeup trailer and it’s like everybody’s won a Tony Award, or two or three. It’s delicious stuff.
DEADLINE: I know you recently wrapped Season 2 of Nine Perfect Strangers, which is so exciting. You’re playing Victoria. What can you tell me about her?
BARANSKI: Well, she’s a woman with a very big secret. She arrives in her Wagner ski outfit, but she’s using a cane. And she meets her daughter, her estranged daughter, and they’re meant to come to this famous European sanitarium up in the Austrian Alps to work out their issues.
DEADLINE: Annie Murphy plays your estranged daughter, right?
BARANSKI: It’s Annie Murphy, yes. She’s divine. She’s my daughter. And Victoria’s carrying a very big secret that she’s hiding from her daughter, but it’s an extremely strained relationship that does get worked out. We just had a marvelous time. We were based in Munich, and it’s Mark Strong, Murray Bartlett and King Princess, the rock star who, I’m going to the theater with tonight. She’s my new young best friend. There are so many great people [in the show]. And Nicole is playing a role that is so perfect for her because she’s so mysterious, and enigmatic, and statuesque, and beautiful. And it’s a beautiful location. So, I absolutely loved doing it on so many levels. It went from January into June. It was a long shoot. It was culturally such a rich experience, and creatively such a rich experience.
DEADLINE: I am hoping we’ll see Melissa McCarthy come back…
BARANSKI: I can only say that every year there are nine different strangers that the show is predicated on the Masha character bringing together different people in a different location…
DEADLINE: I see. That’s your hint…
BARANSKI: Yes. That’s the way the show is structured.
DEADLINE: I know that Nicole had somewhat stayed in character as Masha while shooting Season 1, keeping the accent. Did she do that in Season 2, and if she did, how did that lend itself to your experience?
BARANSKI: Oh, yes. She definitely did. I think Victoria is someone who has stayed at that sanitarium when her marriages were breaking up, but she’s one of those ladies with a history of failed marriages, and this trauma that happened with my first husband that my daughter and I lived through, which is why we’re there to work through that trauma. But the Masha character is the same. I mean, that accent that she has, and the look of it. I mean, she has different hair. Her hair is fantastic. Her whole look is fantastic, but it is that character bringing together a different group of people.