How Oscar van Rhijn Became the Resident Rascal of The Gilded Age

Of all the things that might make Oscar van Rhijn uncomfortable, his shirts aren’t the first to come to mind. After all, the character steps into the forefront of The Gilded Age in the new fourth season with a lavender marriage to the former lady’s maid Enid Winterton not long after losing the family fortune to a scam investment. But to hear Blake Ritson, who plays the wayward heir, tell it, the shirts give the character their own troubles. “Posture is essential to the extent that it's almost encoded within the very clothes they wear; there are incredible starch shirts and collars so you can't slouch,” he explains. “Oscar is a character who is constantly slumping, to the extent that they had to develop a special shirt in which I could slouch.”

It might not sound like such a big deal, but for Ritson—whose own sunglasses and jewelry can sometimes be spotted on Oscar—it speaks volumes about the character. “It feels like a moment of meaningful deviation,” he says. “There’s a deliberateness to it because you have to understand this codified behavior before you know how to deviate.”

Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

Blake Ritson and Kelley Curran in The Gilded Age. The fourth season of the series is airing now on HBO.

And if there’s anything Oscar can be counted on to do, it’s break the rules. The son of society doyenne Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), Oscar has spent previous seasons of the HBO carrying on a secret affair with the presidential descendent John Adams (Claybourne Elder), scheming to marry the new-money neighbor Gladys Russell (Taissa Farmiga), and eventually finding his match in the newly loaded Enid, who brings her own late husband’s fortune to their convenient marriage in exchange for the social clout of the van Rhijn name. If the first episode of the new season is any indication, the two plan to drag New York’s stuffy elite into an era of downtown dance halls and—hold onto your pearls, Agnes—decidedly mixed company.

This desire to shake things up is part of what made Oscar so appealing to Ritson. “He's always been a fascinating character to me in that he's incredibly urbane, witty, intelligent, and eloquent, but there is a vulnerability and a darkness that's simmering beneath the surface,” Ritson says. “His life is circumscribed by the society he lives in and he's always looking for a workaround. I think he sees life as a game where you can rig the rules in your favor, which is delightful to play as an actor.”

Karolina Wojtasik/HBO

Claybourne Eder and Blake Ritson, who played two society men in a secret relationship, in The Gilded Age.

It’s delightful to watch as well. Salli Richardson-Whitfield, a director and executive producer on The Gilded Age, says, “Certain actors are put in the right role where they can shine, and that is what Oscar is for Blake. It's made for him. He has this sort of devilish quality, this fun and this magnetism, and it just pops with the words that Julian Fellowes writes for him.”

Kelley Curran, who plays Enid, notes that the fun the two character have together mirrors the experience she and Ritson have playing them. “I’ve enjoyed working with Blake since our characters met in the first season, it immediately felt like a singular and compelling dynamic on the show,” she says. “The characters both operate outside the normal boundaries of capital-S society, while still moving through it, which I think, as actors, allows you to take bigger risks and bigger swings—and there’s no one more fun to take a big swing with.”

Barbra Nitke/HBO

Kelli O’Hara, Christine Baranski, Blake Ritson, and Louisa Jacobson in The Gilded Age.

Take, for example, a scene in the season’s first episode when the couple comes home from their wedding night, somewhat intoxicated and—propriety be damned—dancing in the foyer. “This season was a lot of Blake and I throwing our weirdest ideas at each other and then playing them to the hilt,” Curran says. “I couldn’t shake this idea that the night of Enid and Oscar’s wedding, when they’re home, drunk and delighted at two in the morning, they would end up dancing up the marble staircase of their mansion, and Blake emphatically embraced it. He was like, “Yes! Let’s go learn some steps of the Mazurka!”

For Ritson, though, a dance is more than just a dance. Oscar’s behavior speaks to the changing world he lives in and also serves to remind viewers that no matter how posh a character might be, they all contain multitudes. “Before we started filming, I remember looking into how these people behaved in private. There are daguerreotypes and oil paintings that are statuesque and stately,” Ritson says, “but I also bought this sketchbook of nobility from the 1880s and they’re all slouching and smoking with things falling out of their pockets. There was always a discrepancy between a public façade and what happened behind closed doors, it’s just harder to record it.”

Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Senior Features Director, covering film, theater, books, travel, art, philanthropy, and a range of other subjects.