Christine Baranski: A journey from Buffalo to ‘The Gilded Age’
A tale of resilience and transformation
Christine Baranski’s mother was a Polish immigrant who survived the Great Depression and spent years working at an air conditioner factory in Buffalo, New York. This background is a far cry from Baranski’s character on Julian Fellowes’ HBO drama, The Gilded Age, where she plays the haughty, imperious, old-money Agnes van Rhijn. However, in a recent interview, Baranski revealed that she drew inspiration from her mother to bring Agnes to life, a performance that has earned her an Emmy nomination for the series’ second season.
Drawing strength from the past
“I watched a tough lady move through life,” Baranski recalls. “They can be very grouchy and very strong and very controlling, but they get the job done.” Agnes, much like Baranski’s mother, endured a long, unhappy marriage to provide for her family, including her younger sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon) and niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson). Agnes is also a staunch enforcer of her era’s social order, often looking down on new money upstarts like her neighbors, industrialist George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon).
This quality makes Agnes what Baranski calls “a walking declarative sentence”: the source of the scripts’ most withering lines and a true successor to Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess from Fellowes’ previous hit, Downton Abbey. “Julian loves those female characters,” Baranski observes. “He respects them. He gives them a sense of humor and resiliency.”
Season 2: A softer side of Agnes
In the second season of The Gilded Age, Agnes softens a bit, accepting Ada’s marriage to the kind-hearted reverend Luke (Robert Sean Leonard) after her initial fierce resistance and then comforting her sister after Luke’s sudden death. Baranski compares the fictional siblings’ relationship to the classic sitcom The Odd Couple. She often hums the theme song on set, a testament to the deep bond she shares with Nixon, whom she has known since they co-starred in a production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.
A theater veteran among peers
The Juilliard alumna has similarly enduring relationships with many members of the cast, which is stacked with fellow theater veterans due to its New York location and the timing of its production during Broadway’s pandemic hiatus. “It’s like watching my theater career in a revolving door,” she says. “It’s the happiest set. I wish this could go on for 10 years just for the pleasure of everyone’s company.”
Saying goodbye to Diane Lockhart
Baranski recently bid farewell to Diane Lockhart, the high-powered lawyer she portrayed for nearly 15 years across the procedurals The Good Wife and The Good Fight. While she is unsure whether she would revisit the character in an in-universe spinoff like Elsbeth, she still emails with co-creator Michelle King about current events that would be fodder for the shows.
“Diane Lockhart still lives in my heart when I watch the news and when I take in what’s going on in the world — that incredible Joan of Arc thing she had of believing in the world and being fiercely idealistic,” Baranski says. “I will always have a part of me that’s Diane Lockhart, and I’m very grateful because she was far more intelligent and savvy than I am.”
A potential ‘Mamma Mia!’ reunion
Baranski is more enthusiastic about the possibility of reuniting with the cast of Mamma Mia!, the ABBA jukebox musical turned film series. She’s even pitched a potential sequel idea to producer Judy Craymer and others. “Wouldn’t it be fun if we all just met on an island in Greece or Croatia and we all spent a couple weeks together, just hanging out, eating and singing all the songs and getting up and telling stories?” she asks. “It would be something of a — I don’t want to say reality show, but it would be like a celebration of the making of ‘Mamma Mia!’”
Agnes would never approve of anything so tawdry as a reality show, so we agree that “docuseries” will have to do.
Insights from ‘Abbott Elementary’
Also on this episode, Abbott Elementary star Quinta Brunson, who’s Emmy-nominated for outstanding comedy actress and comedy writing, and the show’s Randall Einhorn, up for comedy directing, joined the podcast to talk about Season 3 of Abbott Elementary, which is also up for outstanding comedy.
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