[This story contains major spoilers from the season three Gilded Age finale.]

The Gilded Age’s season three finale may have ended with Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George Russell (Morgan Spector) at odds in their marriage, but it also opened the doors for new love stories. And that of Peggy Scott and Dr. Kirkland is one of the most engaging. After being hopeful and then heartbroken throughout most of the finale, titled “My Mind Is Made Up,” Peggy, unlike Bertha, ended season three on cloud nine.

Dr. Kirkland’s epic proposal giving Peggy her well-deserved Cinderella moment sent euphoric waves throughout social media. Days before the finale aired, Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival attendees cheered throughout their advanced screening of the finale. And director Salli Richardson-Whitfield admitted to taking special care with Peggy and Dr. Kirkland to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Getting to the ball sequence, I wanted that to feel like every girl’s fantasy — and I know maybe this isn’t every girl’s fantasy,” she explained, “but to capture that fairytale fantasy Cinderella moment when you’re a little girl of how you’re going to be asked to get married. I wanted to honor that ball, the moment and the history of it, all wrapped up in this beautiful moment. When we see her face, when we push in on her in slow motion, she looks like this beautiful angel full of joy. Every time I see it, I cry.”

Jordan Donica who plays Dr. William Kirkland shares how he felt the joy of that moment. “To get the opportunity to do that in a ball setting was so beautiful,” he said. “I’ve never proposed to anyone in my real life, and I wondered what that would feel like and kept imagining that for myself.”

For Denée Benton, whose pivotal character Peggy Scott was introduced early in the series’ first episode as a savior to Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson) who, in turn, also saved her, this season of The Gilded Age has been a heck of a ride, with the proposal serving as the cherry on top. Benton spoke with THR about the season finale as well as the season overall, touching upon other key moments in Peggy and Dr. Kirkland’s relationship, her clash with Mrs. Kirkland and working opposite Phylicia Rashad, as well as some of her ideas on how Peggy’s wedding to Dr. Kirkland could play out in the already renewed fourth season. Read that chat, below.

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What were the emotions around the magical moment at the Kirkland Ball when Dr. Kirkland, after not really speaking with her, cuts in on Peggy and another man for a dance and then spins her around at the ball and is waiting on one knee when she turns around with a ring?

That day after we filmed it, me, Sonja, Salli and Erica [Armstrong] Dunbar, just burst into tears. They fussed at me for ruining my makeup, because we’ve been dreaming up a moment like that for Peggy since 2019 before they had really carved out the space for the Black elite that we’ve gotten to take up on The Gilded Age. It felt like this moment of like victory and arrival. The crew guys were crying while we filmed it. Jordan really put his sauce on that moment where we just get to see Peggy get chosen and, in her fullness, which I think is what we all deserve.

What draws Peggy to Dr. Kirkland? What really makes her heart smile and go aflutter for him?

Honestly, I think it’s that first moment she meets him at her weakest point, right? Like she’s ill, She’s in her little nightgown, her little Miss Celie plaits, she’s so vulnerable, and he asks her for her work. I think even now, in 2025, feeling like you’re valued for your creativity and your intellect is rare. But in 1883, we can’t underestimate what it was like to have this man see her and have that be what was attractive to him first. I think that just lit her up after her already seeing how fine he was [and] him already helping her life. But I think that at each moment, he is so thrilled by the parts of her that are cutting edge, by the parts of her that push limits instead of a lot of the feedback she gets in her life for being a little too much, or having to convince people of her vision, and he just is down for her vision from the moment he reads her writing. I think it was intoxicating.

Talk about being able to represent the truth of Black women’s involvement in the suffrage movement, which many don’t know is rooted in the anti-slavery movement here in this country, and being able to bring the layers to it this season, especially since a lot of times pop culture doesn’t include Black women in that movement.

How do you erase Sojourner Truth from that? How do you erase Ida [B. Wells]? I think people forget these movements were decades and decades and decades in the making, and founded by women who were never going to see the rights that they were fighting for. They really understood the long game and the seeds they were planting. So I love that we’re speaking Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s name, and we’re saying all four names. Julian [Fellowes, creator] and Sonja [Warfield] were really intense about “No, no, we’re saying all four names every time.” It’s almost like they’re chanting her name back into our consciousness, because there is no Susan B. Anthony, none of those things exist without these conversations that started 60, 70, 100 years prior.

I think it’s really powerful. And I love that we see Peggy in this like old context, but she’s such a cutting edge [figure] she’s really in the muck at every edge of these revolutions. She’s on the fringes in a way that I think is really exciting and it makes me feel like, what movements will we get to see her in as the show goes on?

One of the things Jordan said in his THR interview was that Peggy and Dr. Kirkland’s mom share similar characteristics? Do you see that as well?

We can’t underestimate what it was like for Mrs. Kirkland to hold down her community in the ways that she has as the First Lady of the Church, which at that time, the church is really the center for every revolutionary act that was happening inside Black communities. That in general was where things filtered through. So she and Peggy don’t share the same language, but they share the same vision of protection for their communities. And I think that Mrs. Kirkland just needs to be a bit more intersectional and invite some more people along, but I think their tenacity and resilience is very similar.

Is Mrs. Kirkland’s objection to Peggy purely just their intellectual divide, as well as colorism, or is it also that William, Dr. Kirkland, is her last child, her baby?

It was really interesting to expand the archetype of the “old money versus new money” conversation that we have in all of The Gilded Age and sort of bring in our diaspora experience, because it was the rules of the time. We [The Scotts] don’t come from the right stock for her. And when Agnes does it, we all think it’s a little charming and funny; but when Mrs. Kirkland does it, it’s a bit more villainous because it feels like a different kind of rejection because we all know what Black people were all trying to survive. But it was within the times of “I’m sorry that you don’t hit the checklists.” It is what it is in the same way that Agnes doesn’t like that the Russells are new money so Larry’s not good enough for Marian.

So what is it like as Denée, the actress, who has been supported by Audra McDonald since starting this journey, to spar with Phylicia Rashad?

Anyone who’s ever made eye contact with this special being of a woman understands what I mean, but she has a way of like scanning through you. It’s like she can see your spine. I remember in that scene at the suffrage meeting where she looks me up and down, you feel the chill of her power. It really was like, “oh, Peggy, she’s really a bad bitch,” for lack of a better phrase, to be able to take this woman on, because many would crumble under that gaze. It really was a master class getting to work with actors like this. It feels like I’m in grad school, because they just raise the bar and you have to rise to the occasion.

THR asked Jordan about the scene when William, Dr. Kirkland, introduces Peggy and her parents to his parents with him, you, Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, Brian Stokes Mitchell and John Douglas Thompson, and you are all playing accomplished free Black people in this time period and it’s on television. What was that moment for you?

It was so layered. From the space of being a theater actor, I love seeing how many of my peers are getting their flowers. In the industry, there’s always this fear that you’re going to be gate kept from getting to transition between the mediums when I think of theater actors as like the real Olympians of our craft. So I love that mainstream audiences are getting to give actors like John Douglas Thompson his flowers as well.

From a cultural perspective of my own ethos as an artist, I have this tattoo that’s Kuumba, which is the sixth day [and principle] of Kwanzaa, and it’s using your creativity to leave your community better than you found it. I don’t think any of us can take for granted that maybe outside of Andre Holland’s character in The Knick, we’ve never seen anything like this on television. We’ve never seen this group of people take up this much space and tell this perspective of the story. It sort of speaks for itself. I think it’s why people are so drawn to it. It’s a part of the success of our show that we are breathing life into this intentionally marginalized narrative around these sovereign Black folks who were like the original FUBU [For Us By Us]. I felt like we were all kind of conduits for that, for those ancestors at that time.

I’ve spoken about the direct connection between me and Audra and Phylicia and then Diahann Carroll. It makes me very emotional around the firsts that they all were for Black women on television and Black women on stage, and that it felt almost like an anointing. I wouldn’t say they were passing the baton because they are all very much still running things. Phylicia is directing Pulitzer Prize winning plays on Broadway in her off time. So the legacy is living, but it felt like an invitation into it, which is a depth I think I’ll be chewing on for a really long time.

In Sonja Warfield’s THR interview, she said she thought it was time for Peggy to have a soft life era. Did you feel that too?

Yes, yes, yes. Our show is also loved for how campy and decadent and frothy some of the conflict is, but Peggy was really carrying the emotional weight for seasons one and two. It felt really fun to get to have Peggy giggle and get to have her walk on a promenade along the sea. We see it in her costume story, too. I spend part of season two even in mourning wear, and these dark purples. But this season to see her in these poppy flowers and to see her in the Newport whites. I smiled more in this season than we’ve seen Peggy smile in any of the other seasons. I think it’s important to see her get to bask in the glory of everything she’s fought for. She’s really fought to get to be the multi-hyphenate, creator, activist baddie that she is. Now she’s finding, potentially, her power couple partner who loves her for all of those things, instead of seeing it as some kind of deficit like Mrs. Kirkland does.

And when T. Thomas Fortune and Dr. Kirkland essentially fight over Miss Scott.

I loved the fisticuffs! I just love how many of our fans live vicariously through Peggy, especially the brown skin girls, because we all grew up in a time where the politics of desirability were just not in our favor, and so I do not take it lightly at all how delicious it is to see someone who looks like me being fought over out loud at the train station by these two 6-foot-5-inch beautiful specimens of men that see her value and think that she’s worth acting up about. I think it speaks for itself, even just the image of it, and seeing people’s reactions on Instagram and Twitter. They just loved it and I think it’s been a long time coming.

Talk about the moment when he comes and he knows about her past, and it doesn’t look like we’re going to move forward anymore.

As an actor, it was so beautiful to play within that richness with Jordan and with Audra. For Peggy, it almost feels like the grief opens up all over again. The stakes are so high. You’re just so at risk of being canceled in every moment as a woman in that time for the silliest things, but she also has these really big societal stains on her past, and I think it’s easy to take for granted how much it takes for her to walk with her head high and believe that she has a future. In that moment, all her greatest fears are coming true. That was enough to ruin her chances at having this integrated life. We see her leap over these moments in almost a bigger way than you’ve even seen her in the other seasons. Because of the collapse I like that we get to see her so vulnerable and collapse under the weight of how much she’s moving through. I think we can take for granted how incredible it is that she is able to show up to all the things she shows up to without being a wreck all of the time. And in that moment to have Audra be like, “No, you’re still worthy. You’re still worthy.” t was so powerful, especially even their arc of internal family healing through all of that and to finally see her parents really support her in the way that she deserves.

Even though Peggy’s not in that scene, the showdown between Audra McDonald and Phylicia Rashad as Mrs. Kirkland against Mrs. Scott is epic.

I love how [Dorothy] was like “your son was never truly worthy of my Peggy in the first place” and it just shuts her up. I also love how gagged Mrs. Kirkland looks when he gets down on one knee in front of everybody and chooses her so publicly. It’s a nice moment of vindication and it makes me really wonder if we get a big wedding episode in season four, what kind of shenanigans Mrs. Kirkland is going to try? If we can get Debbie Allen in here like the sister who comes to try one more hijinks or something! These are really good, rich moments. And to see Phylicia, Mrs. Kirkland, when she’s getting the tea [from Leslie Uggams’ Mrs. Ernestine Brown], she’s almost like foaming at the mouth, and she’s like, “If you know something about the woman courting my son, you have a duty to tell me.” They carry the weight of those moments so effortlessly.

Speaking with THR ahead of the finale airing, Salli Richardson-Whitfield spoke of Peggy having a little fear when Dr Kirkland went over to help George Russell who had been shot because she realizes the risk he is taking as a Black man if this man dies.

I think that is something that’s easy to forget in our show because Peggy has these really nuanced, precious relationships with some of the white characters. I think her father is great at reminding the audiences that we’re never safe, but Peggy and Dr. Kirkland interacting with whiteness in those ways is always a trick bag, and there’s no one that’s going to hashtag your death. No one was going to blame these people if they blamed Dr. Kirkland for what went wrong. So the stakes are incredibly high, and I think it’s special to watch Dr. Kirkland get to shine in that moment too, and handle that moment with so much finesse.

Can you talk about the flashback to that scene at the suffrage meeting when everything is going kind of swimmingly for Peggy in her love life and Marian is like, “oh, men, they suck.”

That scene is funny with the sister girls. They’re like, “What’s with her?” Peggy and Marian’s relationship is one of my favorite parts of the show. It also is always real grounding when I get to act with Louisa because all of our first scenes season one were together, and so I love that they get to kind of have these safe girl talk check-ins, because they’re not really in each other’s worlds outside of the house, and so everything gets to be in this sacred code of silence.

What could Peggy and Marian possibly marrying at the same time in a well-deserved season four look like to you?

We got to watch these women come in, really as ingenues, surviving their lives sort of imploding and what it means to rebuild and begin anew. And then see them land into these leading ladies of their own lives. I think Louisa and I, as actors and people, went through a similar arc. So I love the idea of getting to see them shine in their beautiful weddings. I also am excited to hear what Sonja and Julian and the writers do around Peggy and Marian wanting to be at each other’s weddings and how against the social norm it would be if they wanted to be bridesmaids in each other’s weddings. These are the questions that I have because I can’t really imagine either of them saying that in this setting, in this stage in their lives, that they have a closer friend [than each other with whom] they really share [their true feelings]. Other than Ada, I don’t think Marian shares this much of herself with anyone, and we don’t really see Peggy, other than with her mom, confide in anyone the way she confides in Marian. And so I’m curious about what kind of tension will build if they’re really fighting to get to celebrate that day with each other.

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All three seasons of The Gilded Age are now streaming on HBO Max.