Before she was known as Aunt Ada Forte in The Gilded Age, or even as Miranda Hobbes in Sex and the City, Cynthia Nixon was an established theatre star. Notably, in the fall of 1984, she performed in two Broadway shows at the same time: Hurlyburly and The Real Thing, hopping between venues each night, as her characters were on stage at different times in each show.

Besides pulling off that impressive feat as a teenager, the two-time Tony Award winner has performed on stage in some of the American theatre’s most influential plays: The Little Foxes, Rabbit Hole (Tony wins), Wit, Indisrections (Tony nominations), Angels in America, and The Heidi Chronicles, to name a few. In fall 2025, she returns to the stage in the Broadway play Marjorie Prime opposite June Squibb and more.

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The Gilded Age's Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George Russell (Morgan Spector) are a powerfully dynamic duo when they work together, and the same seems to be true for Coon's own artistic collaborations with her real-life husband, Tracy Letts. One of the most highly anticipated events of the theatre season is Coon’s performance in Letts's Bug on Broadway starting in December 2025.

Coon worked with her husband on her prior Broadway outing, too: the 2012 revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Coon received a Tony nomination for her performance as Honey opposite Letts’s George.

Check back for information on Bug tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Long before she was “bedecked in her finest geegaws” as the elegant Aurora Fane, Tony Award winner Kelli O’Hara was known to Broadway audiences as a beloved soprano who has appeared in more than 10 musicals. She often plays strong, complex women like Lili Vanesi (Kiss Me, Kate) and Anna Leonowens (The King and I), who could probably give Fane some tips on how to become independent in the face of her impending divorce.

In fall 2025, O’Hara stars opposite Tom Hanks in his play This World of Tomorrow off Broadway at The Shed. When she’s not performing in plays or musicals, she’s singing opera, including at the Met — the site of much of The Gilded Age season 2’s controversy.

Check back for information on This World of Tomorrow tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

In fall 2025, Patrick Page stars alongside his Gilded Age co-star Kristine Nielsen in Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke for Roundabout Theatre Company. Page is used to playing villains the audience loves to hate; throughout his lengthy Broadway career, he’s performed in roles ranging from Scar (The Lion King) to the Grinch (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) to Hades (Hadestown), for which he earned a Tony Award nomination.

On The Gilded Age, Page plays Richard Clay, Mr. Russell’s right hand man until (spoiler alert) he is unceremoniously fired.

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The Van Rhijn’s cook, Mrs. Bauer, has been busy off screen! Kristine Nielsen’s lengthy Broadway career include popular shows like the original production of the hit musical Spring Awakening to plays like Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike and Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. Not only did Nielsen star alongside The Gilded Age’s Nathan Lane in Gary, but she also replaced Andrea Martin (known to Gilded Age viewers as medium Madame Dashkova) in a performance that earned her a Tony nomination.

This fall, she’ll be joining Gilded Age star Patrick Page off Broadway in Archduke with Roundabout Theatre Company.

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It’s a hard knock life for Van Rhijn housemaid Bridget, but Taylor Richardson is no stranger to such roles. She made her Broadway debut at age 11 understudying Annie in the 2012 revival and went on to play the role, alternating with Stranger Things star Sadie Sink. Katie Finneran, who plays Gilded Age season 1’s high-society matron Anne Morris, was Miss Hannigan.

Richardson returns off Broadway in fall 2025 as Laraine Newman in the Saturday Night Live-inspired play Not Ready for Prime Time.

Check back for information on Not Ready for Prime Time tickets on New York Theatre Guide.

Christine Baranski is known for her feisty and formidable roles on screen, like Tanya in the Mamma Mia! films, Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife, and of course, Agnes Van Rhijn in The Gilded Age. But she has a lengthy history as a theatre performer as well. She made her 1982 debut in Hide and Seek and soon won her first of two Tony Awards for The Real Thing, followed by Rumors.

Baranski often plays high-class roles, but she was last seen on Broadway in 2008's Boeing Boeing, stealing the show in a hilarious performance as French housekeeper Berthe. And we consider the 2025 Broadway revival of Mamma Mia! Christine Baranski-adjacent.

There really was a Ward McAllister, Nathan Lane's onscreen role, who wrote a scandalous tell-all about New York’s Gilded Age society. Lane has a talent for playing larger-than-life roles whom audiences love despite — or perhaps because of — their questionable morals. Lane is perhaps best known for his Tony Award-winning portrayals of Max Bialystock in The Producers, a role he reprised in the film, and Roy Cohn in the 2018 Broadway revival of Angels in America.

Other notable Broadway roles include Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, and the title role in Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus with his Gilded Age co-star Kristine Nielsen.

The actress playing Dorothy Scott needs no introduction to any Gilded Age fans with even a passing interest in Broadway. Audra McDonald has made theatre history by earning 11 Tony Award nominations and winning six times, both a record; she is also the only person to win the award in all four major acting categories.

Her award-winning theatre credits include Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, Porgy and Bess, and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill.’ In 2025, McDonald wrapped her latest Tony-nominated turn as Momma Rose in Gypsy.

On The Gilded Age, McDonald’s onscreen husband is fellow Broadway legend John Douglas Thompson.

After earning breakout fame for playing Marian Brook on The Gilded Age, Louisa Jacobson made her Off-Broadway performing debut in an utterly different role: as a swaggering teenage boy in Trophy Boys in 2025. The previous year, she also co-directed the play Invasive Species off Broadway.

A decade ago, Denée Benton burst onto the theatre scene when she joined the cast of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 for its Broadway transfer, earning a Tony nomination for her performance.

Benton plays Peggy Scott on The Gilded Age, but when she starred in Hamilton on Broadway, she played Eliza, not Peggy. Benton most recently appeared on Broadway as Cinderella in the 2022 Into the Woods revival.

The impressively versatile Donna Murphy is a natural queen bee as The Gilded Age’s Mrs. Astor, who reigns over New York society with an iron fist. A two-time Tony Award winner for her portrayals of Anna in The King and I and Fosca in Passion, Murphy has also starred as comedic leading ladies like Ruth Sherwood in Wonderful Town and the title role in Hello, Dolly! Plus, one of her additional three Tony nominations was for starring in Lovemusik opposite her Gilded Age co-star Michael Cerveris.

Many of Broadway’s most beloved youngsters were first brought to life by Celia Keenan-Bolger, from Olive Ostrovsky in The 25th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee to Molly in Peter and the Starcatcher to Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, a role for which Keenan-Bolger won her first Tony Award. In 2024, she played Martha in Mother Play, a role loosely based on the show's playwright, Paula Vogel.

In 2025, Keenan Bolger was honored with the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her activism in multiple charitable causes.

Michael Cerveris, a Broadway veteran-turned-Gilded Age valet Mr. Watson, has taken on a wide variety of stage roles, from his Tony Award-winning performances as Bruce in Fun Home and John Wilkes Booth in Assassins to the title characters in Sweeney Todd and The Who’s Tommy. He also earned a Tony nomination alongside Donna Murphy (Mrs. Astor on The Gilded Age) for Lovemusik, a lesser-known show about theatrical legends Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

The Gilded Age is not Cerveris's first late-19th-century drama. In 2009, he starred on Broadway in In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) opposite Laura Benanti, who makes a memorable Gilded Age appearance in season 2 as Larry Russell’s paramour, Susan Blane.

Before he was the indomitable Gilded Age robber baron George Russell, inspired by the Vanderbilts, Spector trod the boards in A View from the Bridge, Harvey, and Machinal. In the latter show, he met his now-wife Rebecca Hall.

Additionally, he earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for his performance in Russian Transport off Broadway.

Mrs. Armstrong is more than just a lady’s maid! Debra Monk defies easy categorization as a stage, film, and TV performer who also co-wrote the hit cult musical Pump Boys and Dinettes, marking her Broadway debut as a writer and performer in 1982. A decade later, she won a Tony Award for playing Geneva in Langford Wilson’s Redwood Curtain. She’s also had scene-stealing performances in many Kander and Ebb shows, including Chicago, Steel Pier, and Curtains.

Peggy’s father is an acclaimed actor on both sides of the pond. John Douglas Thompson has been seen on Broadway six times, most recently in the Glenda Jackson-led King Lear shortly after becoming a 2017 Tony nominee for his performance as Becker in August Wilson’s Jitney. In between, he played the Starkeeper in the 2018 revival of the musical Carousel. His Gilded Age wife, Audra McDonald, received her first Tony Award for playing Carrie in the previous Carousel revival in the ‘90s.

On The Gilded Age, Kelley Curran plays Mrs. Winterton, the lady’s maid turned wealthy widow whose ambitious and strategic ways are (almost) a match for her former employer, Mrs. Russell. Curran made her Broadway debut in the 2017 revival of Noel Coward’s Present Laughter, understudying her Gilded Age co-star Kristine Nielsen’s role of Monica Reed. She's also appeared off Broadway in shows like The Half-God of Rainfall and Dracula.

Jack Gilpin plays Church in The Gilded Age, and his Broadway career includes five shows and spans several decades. He most recently appeared in The Elephant Man in 2002 as Bishop Walsham How (and off stage, he really is an ordained clergyman).

But Jack Gilpin is not the only member of his family in theatre: His daughter, Betty Gilpin, made her Broadway debut in 2025 as Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary!

Like the Van Rhijns' English butler Bannister, Simon Jones is actually English. He has performed in scores of West End productions and more than 10 Broadway shows as well, most recently Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress in 2021.

Fun fact: Jones made his Broadway debut in The Real Thing with the actors who play his Gilded Age character’s employers: Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon.

Sullivan Jones has appeared on Broadway in Jeremy O. Harris’s groundbreaking and provocative Slave Play. In The Gilded Age, he plays T. Thomas Fortune, the publisher of The New York Globe and Peggy's boss and love interest.

Monsieur Baudin, the Russells’ “French” chef from Kansas, is used to playing dual identities. Douglas Sills received a Tony nomination for his breakthrough Broadway role as the title character in Frank Wildhorn’s The Scarlet Pimpernel. Most recently, Sills appeared in Broadway's War Paint as Harry Fleming, opposite Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.

Known for playing enterprising footman John "Jack" Trotter on The Gilded Age, Ben Ahlers made his NYC stage debut opposite You's Victoria Pedretti in Tender Napalm off Broadway in 2024. He has yet to make his Broadway debut, but he has performed in shows at prestigious U.S. stage institutions like the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Baltimore Center Stage, and Pasadena Playhouse.

Erin Wilhelmi, who plays Gladys’s lady’s maid Adelheid Weber, has been seen on Broadway three times within three years, performing in The Crucible; A Doll's House, Part 2; and To Kill a Mockingbird between 2016 and 2018.

Before starring as sheltered Gladys Russell on The Gilded Age, Taissa Farmiga starred in an Off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's Buried Child in 2016.