(This story contains spoilers from season three, episode five of The Gilded Age.)
Broadway actor Jordan Donica’s arrival as Dr. William Kirkland has spiced up Peggy Scott’s love life on The Gilded Age.
What started as a house call to treat his mentor’s daughter from a debilitating cold has blossomed into one of the HBO‘s hit period drama’s hottest romances. Since his introduction in episode two (“What the Papers Say”), Dr. Kirkland has become a fixture. Peggy (a role Denée Benton has made a fan-favorite) and her mother Dorothy’s (Audra McDonald) visit to their cousin Athena (Jessica Frances Dukes) in Newport, Rhode Island, where his family has long maintained a home, in episode three (“Love Is Never Easy’) solidified his presence. From the moment Dr. Kirkland knew Peggy was nearby, he reached out with a letter requesting permission to “call on her.” That led to a romantic get-to-know-you stroll, parasol and all, by the sea which evolved into a meet-The-Kirklands moment for Peggy and her parents. The latter, however, didn’t go over well with the good doctor’s mother, Mrs. Kirkland, inhabited by the incomparable Phylicia Rashad, who objects to her son and Peggy’s budding romance.
Her family, she boasted during the two families’ first meeting, has a rich and long history that includes generations of free Black people in Newport. Because of that history, Mrs. Kirkland frowns upon the Scotts, particularly Peggy’s father Arthur (John Douglas Thompson) who was once enslaved. Peggy’s dark complexion also appears to be a concern to her. Then in episode four (“Marriage Is a Gamble”), after attending Peggy’s speech with her husband Mr. Kirkland (Brian Stokes Mitchell) at their son’s insistence, Mrs. Kirkland also objects to Peggy’s outspokenness on race matters and suffrage. That disdain makes her determined to break the hold Peggy has on her son’s heart, creating a formidable roadblock to their promising happily ever after.
As Athena and others speculate whether Dr. Kirkland and Peggy are headed towards marriage, another complication emerges as the two lovebirds take in a baseball game and run into none other than Peggy’s former employer and complicated love interest newspaper publisher T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones). During the exchange, Mr. Fortune, from whom Peggy has worked hard to distance herself, offers her the unbelievable opportunity to interview Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an early Black writer, abolitionist and leading voice of the era who supported suffrage, among other efforts, in Philadelphia that Dr. Kirkland urges her to accept. When Mr. Fortune appears at the train station with his luggage ready to accompany Peggy, who is visibly disturbed by his unexpected presence and intention, Dr. Kirkland jumps to her protection, making his feelings for her even clearer.
The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Donica who is known for his Broadway roles in Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady, Camelot, for which he earned a Tony nomination, and, of course, Sunset Blvd, his most recent credit, and learned that his impressive Broadway pedigree wasn’t what landed him the role of winning Peggy’s heart. It does, however, inform his portrayal of Dr. Kirkland.
His personal experience of being raised by his mother and aunts, he shares, also feeds his character’s relationship with his mother played by Rashad. Donica is also a romantic at heart, which makes showing up for Peggy as Dr. Kirkland all the more effortless. Balancing that love for his mother and Peggy is not easy for Dr. Kirkland, Donica admits, but there is a good reason he refuses to let either one of them go. Arguably, it is his face-off with Mr. Fortune in episode five (“A Different World”) that shows just how serious the good Dr. Kirkland is when it comes to Peggy, giving fans all the more reason to stay tuned into their romance.
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You and Denée were in Into the Woods together.
At New York City Center
So is this how you ended up on The Gilded Age as Dr. William Kirkland?
No. I did three years on The CW’s Charmed. Sonja Warfield watched that show. She actually had no idea that I’m a singer. She had never seen me sing and perform on stage. So they reached out. (At the time) I was cast as the Phantom (in Phantom of the Opera) in London so I was going to move to London last year to do that, and like a day later, I got a call asking me to interview with Sonja and Michael Engler.
They sent me the scenes for what they have written for the character so far. We met for an hour, an hour and a half, and I gave them my interpretation and rundown of not only the research I have done for the time period, but also of the character and how I saw him off the page. It clicked immediately for me. It’s very rare that you read something and how you imagine it in your brain is how it plays out on camera. It felt very natural and symbiotic. Because I’ve done a lot of period pieces on stage, I feel very comfortable in that world. And when we got done filming, Sonja walked up to me and said, “I’m so glad I watched Charmed,” and I was like, “Me, too!”
What was your reaction and vision for Dr. Kirkland?
I’ve done a lot of period pieces, and I’m not a reductionist when it comes to inclusion in stories, not saying that the story has to be about what the person looks like, who’s playing the role. I say that more in a sense of I’m interested in what people who look like me were doing in the time and space of these stories. What I found from doing Phantom, from doing My Fair Lady, from doing even a show like Camelot, is that people have been everywhere. People of all kinds have always been nomadic, have always traveled; we’ve always explored. And, oftentimes, I find that people aren’t ready to have that conversation.
Most of the times people have a blind spot that it’s easier to say those things never existed than it is to embrace them and learn whereas people of color are often put in two positions where we have to re-educate ourselves, and then hopefully re-educate and expand the education of those around us. It’s just kind of the plight we’ve all been dealt, which isn’t necessarily fair, but it is part of why I do what I do, and this was the first time reading it on the page that it wasn’t subtext. It was what the story was about. And I felt like everything I’ve learned subtextually from reading about Alexandre Dumas and his father in France in a time period before this, reading about all the Black people before this, I was just like, “Let me dive into a deeper history of Black America, one that goes beyond slavery, one that is a story that isn’t often told, and if it is, most people write it away as fiction.”
So what was the experience of playing Dr. Kirkland like for you?
It was a lot of fun diving into the history of the Black community and Newport and where they came from, how they got there, when they got there and how they really built up the community where they lived. Was it as large as the Vanderbilts of the world? No, but it was self-sufficient and didn’t rely on white wealth to sustain itself. All those things were on the page, and all those things were fascinating to me. And it was also fascinating to me that he falls in love with Peggy pretty much immediately so then he has to fall in love with all these aspects of her relationship with her father because her father has been such an influence on his life much to the chagrin of his mother. He’s kind of the quiet rebel of the family. He’s always respectful but he is going to live the life that he wants to live. He’s got to continue to open doors for the people coming after him in the way people like Mr. Scott opened doors for him.
Take us to the scene of you as Dr. Kirkland with Peggy, Mr. and Mrs. Kirkland, and Mr. and Mrs. Scott in episode two and you’re there with Denée, Phylicia Rashad, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald and John Douglas Thompson and you are well dressed, highly educated, highly accomplished. With the exception of Mr. Scott, none of these characters have ever been enslaved, and it’s on television.
Yes, It’s on television, and it’s a reality that existed for quite a few Black folks in America and (we’re) able to start that conversation (that) also explores the divides within our own community that still exists today, right? So my hope is that it allows us space to talk with each other in a deeper way and to connect in a deeper way and to heal our own amongst ourselves as a community, to help continue to lift each other up.
But in a scene like that, with the folks that you just named, it’s so easy to sit back and watch, but there’s also a force of excitement. And for me, you just got to use that stuff as an actor because William would be excited to introduce Peggy (although) he knows it’s going to be a little awkward. But part of why I think he falls in love with Peggy is because he knows that this woman is a fighter so (he’s thinking) ‘she will be able to handle all isms of my mother. She’d be able to stand up to her in a way that other women can’t. Other women will just fall over and fold. Peggy can actually debate her, and debate her well, and win. That’s something that none of the women that my mother has tried to set me up with has. They’re all yes people. Peggy has her own mind. She has her own thoughts, much like her father, much like her mother, and that’s amazing.’ That’s where I fall.
And to share scenes with people like that who are so masterful at what they do and who are quite literally, in my own life, people I have looked up to, there’s not much acting that I had to do, because it’s very real. These people are the ones who opened the door for me and Denée and now we get to learn from them, inhabit worlds with them, and hopefully take that torch that much further.
Talk about Dr. Kirkland’s relationship with his mother. After the Scotts’s unpleasant encounter with Mrs. Kirkland about Mr. Scott’s enslaved background, he says “what about his mother?” as he questions his daughter Peggy’s potential for a successful relationship with Dr. Kirkland. So what about his mother? What kind of work did you and Ms. Rashad do to create that kind of quiet tension?
From the moment Phylicia and I met, we dove right into the mother-son (dynamic). When we saw each other in the hair and makeup trailer, she said, “Son,” and I was like, “Mom!” And we don’t get a lot of time outside of the space, right? It’s not like theater where you have weeks of “let’s just sit and discuss this.” So we just dove right into character conversation. I used that time to ask her all of these questions about her feelings towards Peggy, what her feelings about me are, our family history, all this, that and the other. And she’s a wealth of knowledge of history herself as well, so it made it so easy. She also has some energy that’s very familiar to me, that reminds me of my Aunt Kathy who has passed away, but she helped raise me. And so it was very familiar. I was the first boy born, and I was raised by all women, and so I think respect of women is always top of mind when playing any character, but specifically in a show like this.
Speak about Mrs. Kirkland’s specific ideals in terms of race or colorism within the Black community and how her son Dr. Kirkland factors into that. Particularly because one of her objections to Peggy is also her darker complexion.
I (Dr. Kirkland) might not go to Yale or Harvard because I want to have a more ingrained Black experience so I’m going to (the HBCU) Howard (University Medical School in Washington, D.C.), which, of course, she hates. But, in talking with (Phylicia about Mrs. Kirkland), it has nothing to do with the color of someone’s skin, and it has everything to do with the trauma in their family history. And that’s something we still talk about today, how trauma transcends generations, and since our (Kirkland) family has never experienced the trauma of slavery (directly), she’s not very keen on opening up our family to that trauma. So, in defense of her, she’s just trying to protect her family in a very pure sense. Of course, you can get into the colorism aspect as well (because) that plays a role. But that is something that probably isn’t even registering in her brain.
How does Dr. Kirkland approach loving both his mother and Peggy who could possibly become his wife?
What I loved exploring with Dr. Kirkland is the conflict between these two people that he loves and how can I try to resolve that? I got to choose my cane, my ring that I wear, but (the audience) never sees the details of these things. My cane is an elephant, and elephants are matriarchal societies. So out of respect for my mom, I always have her on my arm because I respect the fact that she is our leader. On my ring is a bridge, because I view my character as a bridge between worlds, both the white and Black world and a bridge between people within my own world so it helps to remind me what the ethos of my character is, what the logic of my character is, and you get to see that in different ways throughout the course of the season, within my family, within my profession and within my life. So, it’s been a blessing to portray that.
But talking with Phylicia about these things and through her thoughts about Peggy, because I view Peggy in a very similar way that I also view my mom, Mrs. Kirkland. There’s a lot of similarities: they’re both outspoken, they’re both very intelligent and they’re both leaders in their community; one is just of a different generation and has a different upbringing. But they’re quite similar, and I remember saying that to Mama Kirkland (and she protested) — I really love my mother but, also, I understand that she can say some pretty (cringey) things, but guess what that’s all of us. I think there is a deep respect there and the whole season he is trying to balance that love for his mother and his love for Peggy in a way he’s never had to before.
Well, he’s highly romantic. Is that great to play?
It is. I love romance myself. It’s great and Denée makes it so easy. To not just be romantic but to also be friends and I think that’s a huge key and not something that we see a lot in that time period. It’s kind of like what the Russells have (or had) where there’s this inherent respect for the other in what they do and how they live their lives and there is a desire to let them do that freely and to support it. And I think it’s the same with William and Peggy.
So let’s talk about the fight with Mr. Fortune.
Aw yeah, Sullivan and I. We had fun doing that because we’re both the same size. Denée would always say “yes my caramel kings fighting over me!” (Laughs)
In that moment, Dr. Kirkland really stands his ground and makes it clear that he is going to love and protect Peggy, and there is no man that’s going to get in the way of that.
And it’s an opportunity to show a flash of the non-mild-mannered side of him. We just get a glimpse of it in the eyes and in his response. He’s like, I’m always going to be kind and maintain my gentlemanly composure. But it’s also like, I win; you lost your composure, but, if you want to fight, that’s fine. I don’t mind. And I’m that way in real life, too. So there’s a lot of joy that day because you’re fighting and standing up for what you love and the person that you love. But also her reputation, because it’s about the optics of this. And also this woman told you, no. Kindly. So you need to just keep going. You have a wife and kids. I respect you. We all know who you are. He’s one of the leaders of our community, nationally, at this point in time, in real life. So it’s like, “Why are you behaving this way?” But it’s just fun to do physical scenes like that.
it’s also one of those things where when I (as Dr. Kirkland) learned more about Peggy and her past without her telling me, and Denée and I talked about it often, but Kirkland is also like, “You don’t owe me your deepest, darkest secrets. All I care about is who you are right now. And if this man is going to get in the way with that, I feel so strongly for you that I’ll get into a fight. I’ll mess up my reputation in front of all these people to stand up for you.” And that means a lot, especially because two Black men fighting in a train station, we know how that goes down today. That’s not something that should really be happening for anyone’s safety. But for the love of a woman, whole nations have burned.
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New episodes of The Gilded Age’s third season continue weekly through Aug. 10, streaming on HBO Max.
