TV Talk: CMU grad Denée Benton helped craft, advocate for her ‘Gilded Age’ character
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Denée Benton, a 2014 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s musical theater program, stars in HBO’s “The Gilded Age” (9 p.m. Monday, HBO; also streaming on HBO Max), as Peggy Scott, a young Black woman striving to make it as a writer while working as a secretary for old money matriarch Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski, “The Good Fight”) in 1882 New York.
Benton said she felt immediately connected to Peggy when she read the character breakdown.
“Her particular identity as a Black woman raised as middle-upper-class, educated and with access to rooms that were not necessarily available to many Black people before her or around her, that’s very much been my experience growing up,” said Benton, who was raised near Winter Park, Fla. “I very rarely, especially for a character written in the 1800s, have ever seen that story in the mainstream.”
Peggy is an ambitious writer trying to live a life that’s different from the one her family and society of the era imagine for her.
“I related to growing up as a Black girl in America seeing images that tell you things you can’t do,” Benton said. “Also, just the connective tissue to her being the child of people who were the first generation to have enslavement end, whereas my parents were raised in the Jim Crow South and they were the first generation to have the Jim Crow laws attempt at ending.”
Benton said beginning with her auditions, “Gilded Age” director Michael Engler, who is white, asked how as a Black woman she responded to the scripts by series writer/creator Julian Fellowes (“Downton Abbey”).
“That was the start of me having the first opportunity to add my voice to advocating for some ways that Peggy could be a richer, more nuanced representation of the Black woman at that time,” she said.
Benton encouraged HBO to add Black women to the show’s creative team in empowered positions “so that it wasn’t just me as an actor trying to deal with the power dynamic of getting things changed to my storyline.”
From that advocacy, Black historian Erica Dunbar, who was originally hired as a consultant, eventually came aboard as a “Gilded Age” co-executive producer alongside the addition of Black writer/co-executive producer Sonja Warfield (“Will & Grace”) and Black director/executive producer Salli Richardson Whitfield (“The Wheel of Time”).
Benton said it was important that “there were other Black women who had the skills, who had the cachet and the title within their contracts to be able to affect the story.”
Benton gives an example from an upcoming episode when Peggy visits a publisher to see about getting an article in print. In the original script, Peggy simply goes to a white publisher. In the episode that airs, Peggy will visit the Black publisher of the real-life New York Globe.
“We were able to be like, ‘If we really want to show a fleshed-out Black world of the Gilded Age, we have opportunities, there are other places that existed,’” Benton said. “I think the whole show benefited from the multiple American perspectives, not just having it be a white man’s view of this time.”
Benton said there was some tension around such input, “but everyone handled it with a lot of respect. … I think we’re all really proud of what ended up happening because of some of those difficult, uncomfortable conversations.”
Benton described herself as a “typical theater kid” beginning in elementary school, but by high school, she thought she’d study journalism (or broadcast journalism, “as a way to combine writing and performing”) and political science in college. But performing in a high school production of “Aida” convinced her to pursue acting. She gave her guidance counselor a list of four acting schools she planned to audition for and the counselor wanted her to add one more. She chose Carnegie Mellon.
“And I’m really thankful that I did,” Benton said.
She got her Actor’s Equity card in 2012 while performing in multiple shows at Pittsburgh CLO (“Annie,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Sunset Boulevard”). Benton revisited her CMU speech and dialect courses when prepping for “The Gilded Age,” contacting a former classmate to borrow a copy of “Speak with Distinction,” a book used in a CMU class.
After a national tour of “Book of Mormon,” Broadway roles followed, including playing Natasha in “Natasha, Pierre The Great Comet of 1812” (2016-17), for which she earned a Tony nomination, and “Hamilton,” where she played Eliza on and off for 18 months beginning in 2018.
Her first on-camera role came in 2016 in season two of Lifetime’s “UnReal” where she played reality show contestant and political activist Ruby.
“I remember feeling so excited because I connected to the character so much, like I do Peggy,” she said, before laughing at a memory. “I remember my first walking and talking scene, I kept walking past the camera. The cameraman took my shoulder and he was like, ‘If you are not in front of the camera, the camera cannot see you.’”
The same casting company that recruited Benton for “Hamilton” suggested her for “The Gilded Age.”
“When there is a Black period drama woman, I think I come to mind now, which is funny,” Benton said. “It’s not necessarily something I expected.”
As for Fellowes, who was around for table reads, etiquette classes and the first six weeks of filming before returning to the U.K., his eye for detail became evident during a scene where Peggy hands another character a handkerchief.
“We got a note that was, like, ‘Oh, we need to bring in a smaller handkerchief, Julian thinks that one’s too big,’” Benton recalled. “I didn’t even know he was there. Turns out he was watching from England and he could see in the shot that the handkerchief was oversized.”
In addition to Benton, another “Gilded Age” actor with Pittsburgh ties is Broadway veteran Michael Cerveris (“Titanic: The Musical”), who plays a valet in the new money Russell house. Cerveris had a role in Netflix’s filmed-in-Pittsburgh “Mindhunter” and stayed for a time after that show wrapped. Cerveris’ father is a Dormont native who retired to Franklin Park. In 2021 Cerveris filmed “Basic Psych,” the latest movie from director Melissa Martin (2001’s “The Bread, My Sweet”), in Pittsburgh. Cerveris currently resides in New Orleans.