Robert Sean Leonard and Laura Benanti to get all gussied up for The Gilded Age's second season
The cast list for Julian Fellowes' HBO show is as opulent and expansive as its costumes, apparently.
There’s nothing quite like watching the Julian Fellowes machine when it’s operating at full steam: The Downton Abbey creator’s lavish period pieces—most recently represented on TV by his new HBO drama The Gilded Age—elegantly deploy enormous amounts of money, elaborate costumes, and small, confusing dinner forks to project a vibe-critical air of historical opulence. That includes, as it happens, their attitude toward casting, something emphasized today as Deadline reports that TV vets Laura Benanti and Robert Sean Leonard have now been daintily hoovered up for the show’s recently announced second season.
As Deadline notes, both Leonard and Benanti are just two more Tony winners being tossed into the stacked cast of The Gilded Age—a show that taunts us all by not being the mind-blowing musical it oh so clearly could be. Benanti most recently had a regular recurring role on Hulu’s Life & Beth, playing the mother of Amy Schumer’s character Beth in flashbacks. Leonard has bounced back and forth between Broadway and TV in the years since House went off the air; he most recently co-starred in National Geographic’s The Hot Zone.
Of course, Leonard and Benanti aren’t the only recurring performers being added to The Gilded Age for its second run on TV; that wouldn’t be sufficiently conspicuous an act of talent consumption. Deadline notes that Christopher Denham, David Furr, Ben Lamb, Matilda Lawler, Dakin Mathews, Michael Braugher, and Nicole Brydon Bloom will also all be joining the show in recurring roles, as well as Rebeca Haden, who made a brief appearance in the show’s first season as “the mysterious Flora McNeil.” That’s in addition to the 25 or so main cast (or promoted to main cast) performers set to star in the second season, ensuring that pretty much every single person living in 1880s New York is apparently represented on the show. (Note: We do not currently have historical statistics on how many people were living in 1880s New York, but “twenty-fiveish” feels somewhere in the neighborhood of right.)