The Gilded Age Adds Phylicia Rashad For Season 3’s Black Bourgeois Storyline
Phylicia Rashad is headed back in time.
The veteran actress has just been casted in the third season of “The Gilded Age.” The upcoming season will focus on Black bourgeois community.
“We just got more and more interested in the history of the Black bourgeois community at the end of the 19th century," creator Julian Fellowes told Entertainment Weekly.
"People are not really taught it. They're taught one vision of that society, and the Black bourgeois community has been left out of it, largely. The more we learned, the more we wanted to put it into the show."
Denée Benton, an actress on the series who has been there since season 1, shares she was “hungry” for the show to open up and explore stories centered around the “Black world” after working with consultant, Dr. Erica Dunbar, for the past two seasons.
“It feels like this garden we've been watering since season 1," she said. "Dr. Dunbar and I have been dreaming about what it could be like for the Black world of the show to expand and take up as much space as the white world of the Gilded Age. This season feels like we're getting to see all the flowers blossom of that pursuit. It culminated in us getting to speak to family members in Newport who are descendants of families like the Kirklands that have had Black family members in Newport for 11 generations and still have artifacts of their family from that time."
Joining Rashad will be Broadway star Jordan Donica as Dr. William Kirkland, Benton’s new love interest, and his parents, played by Rashad and Brian Stokes Mitchell.
"Brian Stokes Mitchell's character is based on a prominent Black pastor who became a member of the state assembly or something,” Sonia Warfield, the co-showrunner, explained.
“We wanted to expand the world, and it is real, and it's not something that we see normally on television and film."
You can watch “The Gilded Age” Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.
