‘The Gilded Age’: How The HBO Drama Created A Castle Fit For A New Duchess

Gladys deserves the mother of all castles after the ordeal she went through in New York City. But production didn’t need to go to England to find the perfect home for the new Duchess of Buckingham.

Two different estates in Newport, R.I. — along with one in Long Island — served as Sidmouth Castle in the episode titled “A Different World.” To achieve the opening shot, however, director Deborah Kampmeier relied on an actual pond in England to project the image of Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) and Hector (Ben Lamb) riding a carriage through the estate grounds.

“We put the visual effect of the carriage in upside down in the water, and then the wide shot of it moving through the countryside. That’s England,” said Kampmeier. “And then as we approach the castle, that is an approach to an estate in Newport. We brought in background actors to converge upon the carriage, and then a big crane goes up and over. We actually built onto what was already there in our visual effects. That’s one piece of the puzzle.”

The entrance and several of the castle rooms featured in the episode are from the Newport estates, while the sitting room and long hallways are from a mansion in Long Island. “It is a collage that we use to create this epic castle feeling of a castle, using what we had available to us,” the director said. “We’ve used up pretty much every mansion in Newport.”

While Gladys is certainly accustomed to living in a large house, her new one has to feel to feel different — and so much worse.

“It was important to feel like she’s walking into a very cold, very epic space in which she feels isolated and alone,” said Kampmeier. “We decided to keep it quite gray, to reflect both a feeling of England since we were not in England and to reflect a feeling of that location as well as the inner life of Gladys … just this gray, isolated, lost girl who’s really like a fish out of water.”

Directing for The Gilded Age is “an extravagant experience,” adds Kampmeier, who also helmed episode 2 and the upcoming episode 6.

“This is a show where it’s very luxurious to be able to create a really epic shot that is going to stay in the final cut because the audience is asking for it rather than jumping right to a closeup,” said Kampmeier, whose other credits include Outer Range, Star Trek: Picard, FBI: International and Tales of the Walking Dead. “I do love it.”