Old Westbury Gardens featured in recent 'Gilded Age' episode
Nicole Brydon Bloom and Blake Ritson appear in a scene filmed at Old Westbury Gardens for HBO's season 2 of "The Gilded Age." Credit: HBO / Barbara Nitke
“The Gilded Age” held a garden party on Long Island Sunday night, as the HBO drama set in 19th century New York aired an episode that filmed last year at the historic Old Westbury Gardens. (The episode can also be streamed on Max.)
“Warning Shots,” written by series creator Julian Fellowes and directed by Crystle Roberson, includes two scenes filmed in September 2022 on the historic mansion’s grounds. Series stars and guest actors on location included Christine Baranski, Taissa Farmiga, Harry Richardson and Blake Ritson.
The series, now in its second season and headquartered at Bethpage's Gold Coast Studios, follows the upstairs-downstairs lives of high society, their servants and their factory workers during the robber-baron era that stretched from post-Civil War to the turn of the 20th century.
The show’s location crew “had scouted us in January of 2022,” recalls Syosset’s Paul Hunchak, 59, director of visitor services and public programs at the former John S. Phipps mansion, the site of numerous film and TV shoots. “Then in May they firmed up the dates they would be filming. They were here from September 13 to 24” last year.
Most of it was setup and breakdown, he says. “They filmed here I think just three days.”
In the episode, the historic gardens stand in for the fictional Montgomery Solarium, where a plaque is being dedicated and scion Dashiell Montgomery (David Furr) proposes to Marian Brook (Louisa Jacobson). Another scene finds two different characters sharing a secretive kiss in the garden’s distinctive foam-green pergola.
“They did some minor set dressing,” Hunchak says, “to indicate you're supposed to be in New York City in a private garden.” The crew additionally shot footage that did not appear in the episode, and which may or may not be used in a future one.
Behind the scene of HBO's "The Gilded Age" at Old Westbury Gardens. Credit: Mercedes Zamora
In this separate footage, “They used a roadway on our Orchard Hill property, which is an adjacent parcel, as a Central Park setting.” He notes, “It's a paved roadway, so they had to put down dirt there so it looked like it was period [bridle] path. There were people on horses riding by and crossing by” the actors walking. Other extras were on bicycles.
The HBO and Universal Television series from "Downton Abbey" creator Fellowes also shoots exterior street and park scenes regularly at Old Bethpage Village Restoration, a Nassau County park and living museum.
Other productions that have shot at Old Westbury include Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller “North by Northwest” (1959) — “the famous scene with Cary Grant driving up the roadway to the house,” Hunchak says — as well as “Love Story” (1970) and its sequel “Oliver’s Story” (1978), “Just Tell Me What You Want” (1980), “The Age of Innocence” (1993), “Wolf” (1994), and “Cruel Intentions” and “8MM” (both 1999).
TV shows include “Sex and the City,” "Gossip Girl" and “Royal Pains.”
