If you’ve been watching The Gilded Age, you might not have noticed something the show never tells you: two of its cast members are married in real life, and yet their characters have never once appeared in the same scene together.
Blake Ritson, who plays the closeted, old-money bachelor Oscar van Rhijn, and Hattie Morahan, who plays the sharp-tongued Lady Sarah Vere, have been a couple since long before either of them stepped foot on the show’s set.
Related: The Gilded Age Should Be a Cautionary Tale
They met at Cambridge
Ritson and Morahan’s story doesn’t start on a Julian Fellowes set. It starts at Cambridge University in the late 1990s, where the two met as students.
From there, their paths ran parallel through British theater and period drama — Ritson building a résumé that includes Da Vinci’s Demons, Krypton, and Upstairs Downstairs, while Morahan became known for her Olivier Award-winning stage work and her turn as Elinor Dashwood in the BBC’s 2008 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
They were together for years before marriage ever entered the conversation. In a 2015 interview, Morahan brushed off wedding talk entirely, joking that it might happen “when we’re 80.” As it turned out, the couple took their time — reportedly marrying sometime between late 2024 and early 2025, keeping the milestone almost entirely private.
A family built alongside two careers
Long before they made it official, Ritson and Morahan started a family. Their daughter, Amity, was born in 2016, followed by a son in 2020. True to form, the couple has kept their kids largely out of the public eye, offering fans only glimpses of their life together in London.
Two characters who never cross paths
Here’s the twist: even though Ritson has been part of The Gilded Age since it premiered in 2022, Morahan didn’t join the cast as Lady Sarah Vere until Season 3.
And despite now technically being colleagues on the same HBO drama, Oscar van Rhijn and Lady Sarah Vere have yet to share a single scene.
It’s a strange bit of trivia for a real-life married couple — appearing in the same prestige drama, in the same universe of scheming socialites and old-money rivalries, without ever crossing paths on screen. Whether that changes in a future season remains to be seen.
The Gilded Age is currently streaming on HBO, with Season 4 expected to premiere sometime in late 2026. Watch it now!