Legendary actress Phylicia Rashad joins season 3 of HBO’s ‘The Gilded Age.’ Black elitism is the new focus of season 3 of the American historical drama series. Rashad joins Tony Award-nominated actress Audra McDonald and others in the upcoming season.

“We just got more and more interested in the history of the Black bourgeois community at the end of the 19th century,” the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, told Entertainment Weekly. “People are not really taught it. They’re taught one vision of that society, and the Black bourgeois community has been left out of it, largely. The more we learned, the more we wanted to put it into the show.”

Actors Denée Benton as Peggy Scott and Audra McDonald as Dorothy Scott were already part of “The Gilded Age.” Now, Broadway sensation Jordan Donica will play Benton's new love interest, Dr. William Kirkland, along with his parents, Phylicia Rashad and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

“I feel like people love our show because of the beautiful, camp drama. And I do think they come to learn something,” Benton said, per The Wrap. “Exploring the nuances of the Black communities in that time, Black wealth, and the white supremacy that still found its way into those dynamics is really interesting meat to get into.”

Fans are happy to see Rashad return to acting after she stepped down as the dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at her alma mater, Howard University, last year. In 1970, Rashad earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Howard. She then began her acting career, and her most well-known part was that of Clair Huxtable on the renowned comedy The Cosby Show. In May 2021, she began working at Howard as the dean of the College of Fine Arts.

Rashad led important developments at the Howard University Fine Arts Department while serving as its dean. The Chadwick A. Boseman Memorial Scholarship, which provides new theater students with a four-year scholarship paying the entire cost of university tuition, was established thanks in large part to her negotiating a $5.4 million grant from Netflix. She was also in charge of hiring several of the department's esteemed faculty members.

Viewers can watch “The Gilded Age” every Sunday at 9 P.M. ET on HBO.