It’s easy to joke about the fact that Carrie Coon has become something akin to the patron saint of prestige TV in recent years. With a run of 2010s television that moves from The Leftovers, to Fargo, to The Sinner, Coon has consistently given some of the small screen’s best performances—to the point where it feels like a too-on-the-nose joke to suggest that, were a network like HBO suddenly forced to re-cast one of its big television projects at the very last minute, they’d just shrug and toss Carrie Coon the job.
Anyway, HBO has just shrugged and tossed Carrie Coon a job, with Deadline reporting that the actress has been re-cast as the lead in Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age. Coon steps into a part that was previously held by Amanda Peet, who was forced to drop out of the project due to COVID-19 related scheduling conflicts. (And not, hopefully, just a bad case of “Not being Carrie Coon.”) The series is being aimed at a fall production start, and hey, who knows, maybe it’ll even pull it off.
Set in 1880s New York, The Gilded Age is Fellowes’ first big project since wrapping up Downton Abbey with a movie last year, and was originally supposed to land at NBC. Coon will play Bertha Russell, an originally middle-class woman aiming to break into some of the highest society going, after years of backing her “financial genius” railroad baron husband (Morgan Spector). She joins a cast that includes Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Denée Benton, Louisa Jacobson, Taissa Farmiga, Blake Ritson, Simon Jones, Harry Richardson, Thomas Cocquerel and Jack Gilpin.