Laura Benanti, Robert Sean Leonard & More Join THE GILDED AGE Season Two

Laura Benanti and Robert Sean Leonard have joined the second season of THE GILDED AGE in recurring roles.

Deadline reports that the pair will appear in the new season alongside guest stars Dakin Mathews (Waitress), Christopher Denham (The Lieutenant of Inishmore), David Furr (Burn This), Ben Lamb, Matilda Lawler (The Ferryman), Michael Braugher (To Kill a Mockingbird), and Nicole Brydon Bloom. Rebeca Haden, who appeared in season one, has also been confirmed to guest in the new season.

Laura Benanti will play Susan Blane, a recently widowed by a rich, dull older man. A glamorous beauty living in Newport, Susan hires Larry as her architect for a major renovation on her Newport home.

Robert Sean Leonard joins as Reverend Matthew Forte, who recently moved from Boston. Matthew is the new rector of the church attended by New York's high society.

As previously reported, Kelli O'Hara, Donna Murphy, Debra Monk, Kristine Nielsen, Taylor Richardson, Ben Ahlers, Kelley Curran, Douglas Sills, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Michael Cerveris, Erin Wilhelmi, Patrick Page, and Sullivan Jones will appear in the second season as regulars.

Christine Baranski, Cynthia Nixon, Carrie Coon, Morgan Spector, Louisa Jacobson, Denée Benton, Blake Ritson, Taissa Farmiga, Simon Jones, Harry Richardson, and Jack Gilpin will also resume their roles as series regulars.

Audra McDonald, Nathan Lane, John Douglas Thompson, Ashlie Atkinson, Claybourne Elder, and Ward Horton will also appear in the second season as recurring characters.

The first season of the acclaimed HBO series featured several Broadway stars in recurring, regular, and guest appearances. Check out BroadwayWorld's complete guide to every Broadway actor in THE GILDED AGE season one and how you know them here.

The American Gilded Age was a period of immense economic change, of huge fortunes made and lost, and the rise of disparity between old money and new. Against this backdrop of change, the story begins in 1882 - introducing young Marian Brook, the orphaned daughter of a Union general, who moves into the New York City home of her thoroughly old money aunts Agnes van Rhijn and Ada Brook.

Accompanied by Peggy Scott, an accomplished African-American woman, Marian inadvertently becomes enmeshed in a social war between one of her aunts, a scion of the old money set, and her stupendously rich neighbors, a ruthless railroad tycoon and his ambitious wife, George and Bertha Russell. In this exciting new world that is on the BRINK of the modern age, will Marian follow the established rules of society, or forge her own path?

Most recently, Laura starred as Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway Revival of My Fair Lady. Prior to that, she co-starred alongside Amy Schumer and Keegan Michael Key in Steve Martin's hit Broadway play, Meteor Shower. She has also been seen in She Loves Me, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Sound of Music, Into the Woods, Swing, The Wedding Singer, Nine, and more. She won a Tony Award for her role as Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy, opposite Patti LuPone.

Robert Sean Leonard won a 2001 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor for his performance in the Lincoln Center Theater production of The Invention of Love. He has also been seen in The Music Man; The Iceman Cometh (with Kevin Spacey); Arcadia; Candida (at Roundabout, for which he received a Tony nomination); Philadelphia, Here I Come; The Speed of Darkness; Breaking the Code; and Brighton Beach Memoirs.