Welcome to Karen Hunter's awesome. I'm Karen Hunter. And joining me today is the wonderful,

amazing Jessica Francis Dukes. She is the star of Earth Abides. If you haven't seen that,

go get your life. And the season three of the Gilded Age,

this woman plays a very fancy black woman.

She's part of a very wealthy, well-heeled black family.

And we're getting to see more of them this season than ever before.

And so I wanted her to come in today to talk.

Hello to you, Jessica.

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

I am so happy to be here.

Okay.

So because we are doing this and people know me,

so y'all, we just had like an hour-long conversation.

All right, I'm exactly.

It was, it was 30 minutes, 30-something minutes.

And I didn't hit record, right?

So I said, I went to stop the thing, and I said, Jessica, I didn't hit record. She's so

gracious, so I appreciate you continuing with. Absolutely. I have no problem whatsoever. I love your show. I love talking to the people. I love telling our stories and I love talking about us. So.

Okay. So the Gilded Age for people who aren't familiar with it is a TV series on HBO Max. It comes on on Sunday nights. This is season three. It was written and developed by Julian Fellows.

Many of you may know him from Downton Abbey, you know, and all of those. Dub, da, da, da, da, dup, dup, dup. And it centered season one on a family of folk who are on the come up. Their Nouveau-Riche. They come out of the railroad industry, which is not really looked upon as something that is,

you know, not like the old money people of New York. And they're not looked upon favorably at all,

...