‘The Gilded Age’ Stars Harry Richardson And Louisa Jacobson Unpack “One Night Shift” For Their Characters In Season 4 Premiere

SPOILER ALERT: This post spoils the premiere episode of The Gilded Age, Season 4, now streaming.

Marian Brooke (Louisa Jacobson) has been quite unlucky in love throughout her time on The Gilded Age, and the Season 4 premiere continues to suggest this may be the case after she reunites with Larry Russell (Harry Richardson).

Following Oscar van Rhijn’s (Blake Ritson) marriage to Enid Winterton, formerly Bertha Russell’s (Carrie Coon) maid Turner (Kelley Curran) in the first episode, titled “Ring the Bells,” Marian lets herself be persuaded to go to a brothel bar, where she runs into Larry. He hints at the disorderly house having to do with their argument last season, in which Marian wouldn’t let go of the fact that he and Jack Trotter (Ben Ahlers) went to a house of ill repute after Larry had told Marian he was going somewhere else.

Marian and Larry get to dancing, and Larry offers to share his cab home with Marian in the midst of a tropical storm — based on a real one in 1885 — that has hit New York, spooking the horses pulling their carriage into breaking one of the wheels. This brings Larry to get two hotel rooms for himself and Marian, and, while the separation is offered, Larry knocks on Marian’s door, finding her in her night clothes, and the pair have sex.

“It’s simultaneously so magical and so cathartic to finally see them physically express love to each other,” Louisa Jacobson told Deadline. “Then, as I kept reading the script, I read the next day, and I was so frustrated. But I actually really welcomed the challenge. I knew that Marian’s reaction to having recognized this grave transgression, which it was in the time period, I knew that the morning after was a very, very important scene to set me up for the rest of the arc for the season.”

Marian anxiously communicates how what happened could ruin her reputation to Larry the next morning when she wakes him up, already dressed to leave, and bolts out the door for home. Her aunts, Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) and Ada Forte née Brooke (Cynthia Nixon) were notified by telegram that she would be staying overnight in the hotel. They notice her shaken state when she returns, without informing them of what happened.

“I felt a serious responsibility on my shoulders to convey the stakes of the 19th century, the consequences of premarital sex for a woman being so high, and so much higher than they were for [Larry] and for any man in that case,” Jacobson continued. “It’s playing with this tension between knowing it was probably the best night of her life, and living in a world where she’s taught to understand the best night of her life [is] a thing that is so shameful and so terrible and impure and could, if anyone found out, cast her out of society and ruin her life.”

Co-showrunner Sonja Warfield worked with creator Julian Fellowes to build up to this moment after Bertha’s new French lady’s maid caught Marian and Larry kissing in Season 3.

“I had talked to Julian probably a couple of years ago about what would happen if they had had sex, and he would explain to me how they wouldn’t really ever have sex,” Warfield told Deadline. “Nor would they have a chance to because they were always chaperoned, and in my head, I started thinking up reasons and ways in which we could engineer a situation [where] they were alone and there were elements that were out of their control.”

Warfield credits HBO with asking her and her writers if they could take Larry and Marian a “step further.”

“It was something we had been thinking of, and I think planting because there’s also that moment in Season 3 where he pulls her into the back of the carriage because that’s the only place where they could really have privacy,” the co-showrunner said.

“So then I started thinking, what would be their equivalent of a flat tire? The wheel would break, but if you’re in New York, you would just get another cab. Why would there be a reason why they couldn’t get another cab?” Warfield added. “What if there’s a really bad storm? Then I started talking to Dr. Dunbar, who did research and found out that there was a tropical storm in 1885. Then we were off to the races.”

Harry Richardson “enjoyed the challenge” of this storyline for Larry.

“He’s quite happy-go-lucky and ignorant to how intense this is for Marian, and the thing I was excited to dive into is: he has all of this love and this adoration and this wish to connect, and they’ve had so much fear and they’ve been miscommunicating over the previous season and not quite coming together,” the actor said. “He’s just like a puppy. He wants to be with the person who he adores. Then we get this one night shift where seeing the heartache that it’s now causing for the person he loves the most and how serious that is is an awakening for him and a maturing for him.”

“He hasn’t contemplated that the stakes aren’t as high for him. The risk to be shunned out of society and to really damage his future isn’t there, and I think he gets a really humbling awakening and self-confrontation,” Richardson continued.