[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers through Episode 8 of Season 3 of “The Gilded Age“]
We’ve come a long way on “The Gilded Age” from the marquee moment of drama being Agnes (Christine Baranski) crossing from one side of the street to the other. Season 3 of the HBO series has traveled from Arizona to across the Atlantic, with of course plenty of time spent in our favorite old (and new) homes in New York. That presents a new kind of challenge for production designer Bob Shaw and his team, now that they’ve mastered the miles of marbling and ostentatious opera house decorations of Seasons 1 and 2.
The Russell Mansion and the show’s New York backlot live on Long Island — it feels appropriate that, by contrast, the Van Rhijn house is in Queens. And of course, the “The Gilded Age” production design and locations team is still getting through their wishlist of period-appropriate homes and mansions around the East Coast. But Season 3 called for some canny set and location management, in order to fit in everything from a mining town to an English manor in between the show’s existing builds.
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“ Once you build that set [the Russell House], taking it down and putting it back together would be almost as expensive as making it to begin with,” Shaw told IndieWire. “The Western town was definitely a curveball [and] we ended up building it on our backlot. There had been a place where the ferry landing in New Jersey was from Season 1, and it’s like, well, if we take that down, we can put the Western town there.”
“The Gilded Age” is particularly adept in its ability to stitch together location and set work without any sign of a seam. Characters can walk through a door in Newport and enter into a room that’s in New York. But Shaw and his team have also always collaborated with the show’s VFX department to make set extensions and the work of filling out locations equally as invisible, and that work was important for the Western mining town Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) visits, as well as its visit to showrunner Julian Fellowes’s home turf.
Shaw and his team were responsible for creating the fictional English country estate of Sidmouth, home of the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) and his new Duchess, Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga) — “Nothing’s going to slip by [Fellowes] in that department,” Shaw said. It’s a mix of the show’s typical approach to cherry-picking parts of incredibly preserved, historically appropriate existing locations, buildings, and VFX.
Much of Sidmouth was shot around Ochre Court, a mansion that was the largest in Newport for three months before The Breakers opened; it was a finalist for “The Gilded Age” production design team for the ball sequence way back in Season 1, but ultimately was too busy being used as social-distanced classrooms at the time.
“It was on my list from the beginning, so to finally get to use it was very rewarding. I happen to think the outside is the most elegant in appearance, but we actually had to change the roof line because it has a mansard roof, which is very French and not very English,” Shaw said.
Enter visual effects supervisor Douglas Purver, who went to England and LIDAR-scanned another house, so that it could be Frankensteined together with what “The Gilded Age” production team shot. Shaw and Purver start talking about the ways in which the two departments can support each other very early on in the research and development process for each season of the show, a process they really perfected when creating the opera house in Season 2.
“A lot of it is coming up with an approach. Like, when we lay out the Western town, we have an idea of how much more there needs to be, so we show him what we’re providing and then we talk about how much needs to be done in CG,” Shaw said. “He really won’t know until they have something cut together because, for example, we could say this will extend another thousand feet in this direction and then find when they do the cut that they never look in that direction.”
This means the conversation has to keep going to achieve the best results, even after the production design team has technically closed up shop. For a sequence at the end of Episode 6, “If You Want To Cook an Omelette,” when Bertha (Carrie Coon) finally leaves Sidmouth Castle, the shot starts inside the Ochre Court location, looking towards the outside, with a suitably grand porte-cochère for her carriage to pull into. Shaw happened to meet with Purver after he’d wrapped his own work on Season 3, to have lunch and see how things were going, and noticed the ceiling of the porte-cochère was flat concrete.
“I said, ‘Oh, that would be coffered or something like that,’ and he said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ and I pulled a few references offline, and it made a big difference in the shot. It wouldn’t have been there if we didn’t continue to stay in touch after we’d wrapped. The coffered ceiling there was done by VFX and it takes up probably more than a third of the frame. It really was a lucky thing we planned lunch on that given day.”
As for the more action-oriented sequences, of which the carriage striking of Oscar’s (Blake Ritson) savior John Adams (Claybourne Elder) is but the latest, Shaw’s and Purver’s departments are both to blame. Obviously, only digital horses were harnessed in the hit-and-run, but the surrounding mayhem and carriages are the production team’s purview.
“ The prop department has been dealing with various vendors of carriages and the wagons and whatnot. There are a number of people we work with — strangely enough, in New York, it’s considered part of the prop department and in Los Angeles it’s part of the teamster department,” Shaw said. “There are more collectors out there than you would like and it is easier to find them now, because of the Internet.”
“The Gilded Age” has packed its backlot tight, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look both ways before you cross.
“The Gilded Age” is streaming on HBO.
