Denée Benton knew her way around a corset before being cast on The Gilded Age. The Broadway star had spent years performing eight shows a week in period finery, first as the Tolstoy heroine in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812—for which she received her first Tony nomination—and later as revolutionary wife Eliza in Hamilton. With her latest role as writer Peggy Scott on The Gilded Age, Benton’s using her theater skills to play a Black woman in the late 19th century who is determined to make her own way in the world.
“It feels like this really powerful connection to the future of Black girls, and to the past,” Benton tells BAZAAR.com. Peggy is a member of an upper-class, post-slavery Black community—one that typically isn’t presented on television. “With Peggy, it feels like me getting to breathe life into this ancestor who shows us who we always have been, and therefore, what we always can be.”
Once she landed the role, the star fiercely advocated to have her character be as well-rounded as possible, with no limits to the career she could want or the fine clothes she could wear. Benton believes that her biggest contribution was calling for the Black women on the show to have more power on the creative team, so that they could help shape the storylines. With women like historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar having a large role, Benton shares, “It wasn’t just on my shoulders as an actor with that power dynamic—to have to be going to Oscar Award–winning Julian Fellowes and all of these 60-plus white men with incredible career power, trying to advocate for my character,” she says.
Below, we talk to Benton about the Black women behind The Gilded Age, seeing herself in Brandy’s Cinderella, and working with her childhood idol, Audra McDonald.
Did you enjoy those kind of ornate period dramas when you were growing up?
I love Brandy and Whitney Houston’s Cinderella so much—I liked the fantasy of all of it. But I was always frustrated that after that, I don’t think I saw a Black woman in a period drama until I saw Belle. And that kind of reignited my excitement for stories that took place in that period that I could be a part of.
Were there parts of your character that you related to?
Oh, my God. Immediately. As a Black woman—and then also as a Black woman who was raised in the middle-to-upper-middle class—you never see yourself in the media. When you’re a kid, people make fun of you for sounding white, or you go to school with white kids and you don’t fit in. You can see you’re alone. Because our history can be so erased, we’re disconnected from the fact that we come from lineages of Black people who existed in this particular cultural class model.
When I read Peggy’s story, I thought, I’ve played all of these aristocratic white women for the last five to eight years. When I did Great Comet, I did this thing on my Instagram called the Black Princess Project, where I did my own research of Black women royalty from around the world throughout history. So it felt like I got to manifest Peggy in a way, ’cause I carry this time period so well, clearly, but I want to tell my own stories.
Finding Peggy felt like I got to connect with this spiritual ancestry. She walked the tightrope that I walk, and I get to point back to the 1800s and be like, “Oh, there I am. There’s that Black interior family life that I have. I’m not atypical. I am a part of the narrative and the lineage of Blackness.” It’s just a story that’s been intentionally erased.
Photographer: Alison Cohen RosaHBO
When I think of Black New York, I think a lot of Harlem, but the fact that she lives in Brooklyn, the fact that she is middle, upper-middle class, so many people wouldn’t have even known that was a thing or not have thought of it before seeing the show.
Exactly. Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese’s movie, completely erased the fact that downtown Manhattan was a Black and Irish neighborhood. It’s famous for the fact that right before, during, and after the Civil War, Black and Irish people lived side by side. There has been this intentional erasure that whitewashes the narrative of our history, that has us in this hamster wheel of forgetting. Whether it’s as insidious as erasing us from movies or as overtly terrorizing as blowing up Black Wall Street, there seems to have always been this attack on the visibility of the upward mobility of Black people.
It felt like a huge responsibility to me when I got cast in this role to be like, “Okay, cool, Julian. So great that you wrote Peggy in. Now we’re gonna really make sure she’s as right as she can possibly be, if this is one of the first times this story is gonna be told in the mainstream.”
I read that you gave Fellowes a lot of insight toward Black history. What specific details for Peggy did you want included in the show?
I have to give credit entirely to the Black women of The Gilded Age. Dr. Erica Armstrong Dunbar, one of our co-executive producers, has her Ph.D. in American history of this time period, and as a Black woman, she had a focus on Black studies and women’s studies. She was an invaluable resource. And then [writer] Sonja Warfield and [executive producer] Salli Richardson-Whitfield were really the chef’s kiss on top—having these Black women with real, empowered positions on the creative team to affect the way the whole world is being crafted, and especially to protect the dignity of the Black world and expand it.
There are some things that I can’t mention, but there were parts of Peggy that were entrenched in limited white imagination and entrenched in stereotypes. We were able to come with alternative solutions. Like, “Let’s not be limited by the type of occupation Peggy can have. Let’s not be limited by who Peggy can love. Let’s not be limited by what Peggy can wear.”
The scene that happens with me and Audra in the first episode was originally later in the show, and Dr. Dunbar and I were like, “No, we need to move that scene up. We need to see that there is Black life earlier in the series, so that Peggy is not just a token only beholden to the white gaze.” And that gives her the opportunity, when she’s leaving Agnes’s house to go see her mom or to the publishing offices, to be dressed in the same standard and quality of colors and fabric as the white women in the show who have a similar socioeconomic status. Some things that were kind of limiting even in the colors that she was wearing, even in the fabrics—we really got to bust that open and be like, “No, we need to see this Black woman in a similar aesthetically dignified space as the other white women in this show.” The political nature of Black women and beauty standards is so powerful.
Another big thing that manifested was Marian and Peggy’s relationship, and really making sure that it wasn’t rooted in any kind of, like, white hero narrative or any magical Negro narrative. Some of those tropes had shown up at the beginning that we were able to sort of educate Julian on. For me as an actor, the biggest role that I had was advocating for Black women to be added to our creative team, so that it wasn’t just on my shoulders. I feel really proud of finding the language to be like, “Dr. Dunbar needs to be a co-EP. Sally needs to be an EP. There needs to be a Black person in these roles.”
You’re working with Audra McDonald and she’s playing your mom. How was it working with her?
As a teenager, Audra was the person that I would hold in my eyes to feel like this dream was possible for me. I was always so scared there wouldn’t be space or interest in the industry for a Black girl like me, since I didn’t really seem to fit a lot of the stereotypes. Audra was the person that I would look to and be like, “Okay, well, Audra did it.” So the fact that I get to play her daughter is one of those full-circle, God wink, gratitude moments that I will tell my grandchildren about.
Speaking of full circle, how does it feel to know that perhaps now you might be the person a little Black girl is looking up to on HBO?
That’s the part that definitely makes me emotional. It feels like this really powerful connection to the future of Black girls, and to the past. I hope that when Black girls watch Peggy, they see what’s always theirs. It’s not that I’m doing something different or that this is fantasy. She’s your lineage. She lives in your blood too. You get to claim fully what you dream for yourself, because it has already existed.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Denée Benton on Fighting for Authenticity in The Gilded Age
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