The Gilded Age’s Louisa Jacobson on Growing Up as Meryl Streep’s Daughter: “I Was Afraid of Being Judged”

“I think,” she starts, then: thunder.

“I mean,” she tries again, but: lightning.

The rain starts coming in sheets. Her creamy Kallmeyer blouse has a damp sheen. The hem of her vintage wool pants gets wet and turns color from camel to mule. A few droplets land on her Miista fisherman sandals, making them seem almost bedazzled.

“Come on!” she shouts to the clouds. Then, back to me: “OK. So. I think the strongest thing you can do is admit what you want. Even if you’re judged for it. You have to choose what’s true, or you’ll never be happy. I am still learning how to do this. That’s it.” She side-eyes the clouds again. “That’s it!”

But the sky is listening now. It suspects, like many of us do, that Jacobson might be pretty interesting, even when she’s not sopping wet.   

HBO Max is banking on this — it has installed the 35-year-old actress as the steely point of The Gilded Age, a class-panicked soap opera about fin de siècle New York. The show returns for a fourth season on November 1.

Defiantly awesome brands like Eckhaus Latta and Kallmeyer are also Team Louisa, employing the jut-cheeked blonde in ads and social media content for the fall season. In late August, Jacobson was named to the Vanity Fair Best Dressed List, joining the ranks of Nicole Kidman, Harry Styles, and Rihanna. Looking at the hoops running up both her ears, I kind of want to pierce my own cartilage with a vintage Miu Miu brooch, even though needles freak me out. She has achieved Cool Girl status on a molecular, should-I-stab-myself level. She laughs hysterically when I say so.

And then there is The Challenger, an upcoming TV thriller starring Kristen Stewart as legendary astronaut Sally Ride. In the show, Jacobson plays her longtime romantic partner Tam O’Shaughnessy, who needed to stay secret in order to protect Ride’s NASA job. “I started pushing my agents to look for more queer stories,” says Jacobson, who came out as queer herself in 2025. “I understand actors who feel like they can’t do that. I have queer friends who still only want to play straight roles. But I’m in a place now where I really want to embrace it.” 

Jacobson’s easy bravery is a recent development for the Brooklyn native, and she admits it. “I was pretty lost in my early 20s. I hadn’t yet admitted to myself that I really wanted to be an actress. I hadn’t come out yet. I was afraid of being judged. … Maybe I put up some walls around things I loved.”

This would be totally normal for anyone, but Jacobson had some extra Vuitton streamer trunk to add to her post-adolescent emotional baggage. Mainly, Jacobson is the youngest daughter of Meryl goddamn Streep.  That means no matter how good she is at her job — and critics agree that Jacobson is excellent — the internet’s gonna internet.

“I lived under this anvil of being my mother’s daughter,” admits Jacobson, who was raised between Los Angeles and Connecticut. “And my older sisters [Mamie Gummer, 43, and Grace Gummer, 40] are also amazing. So I’m already in their shadow. It’s a heavy thing.”

Like Tracee Ellis Ross or Maude Apatow, Jacobson is the kind of Hollywood legacy kid who can confront her good fortune while challenging norms about female star power. She knows she is a nepo baby, and she really knows that Redditors feel “like I didn’t deserve [success] or that things were given to me.”

“You know,” she says, ducking a stream of rain runoff, “they’re not wrong. But you have to stay in the room.”

The challenge, Jacobson admits, is that for years she pretended she didn’t even want to be in the room. After graduating from Vassar with a psychology degree, she got a job working retail for the designer Clare V., then serving as a corporate assistant at an ad agency. “My favorite part was the focus groups,” she says, grinning. “I just was fascinated watching all these strangers come and talk about something.”

But eventually, Jacobson had to admit to herself that she wanted to be a performer, even though she knew there would be some online rants about her family connections. “But I couldn’t ignore what I knew was true. I had to do this to be happy.”

In 2017, Jacobson secretly applied to Yale’s graduate program, where after three rounds of competitive auditions, she joined fellow trainees like Stereophonic’s Juliana Canfield and the playwright and Emily in Paris scene-stealer Jeremy O. Harris. “I was thrown in with 15 other random people around my age. We all had very different life paths, and we all got to expand and learn and make mistakes and fuck up. Everyone’s doing it together. No one’s feeling more special than anyone else. It was the best thing I’ve ever done for myself. I think I needed that extra level of inner belief and faith in myself in order to deal with the world and how the world perceives me.”

At first, that perception was glowing. After graduation, Jacobson landed roles in critically-acclaimed plays like Lindsay Joelle’s Trayf and Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding and was regularly praised by theater critics for her nuanced, robust performances. Between gigs, she worked like many actors do as a waiter, where Mike Eckhaus — one half of the cult-favorite Eckhaus Latta label — ran into her on the job. “I was at a design event during Pride at a friend’s loft in Tribeca,” he recalled. “She was working there as a cater-waiter. We struck up a conversation and made the type of plans you make when living in New York where you exchange numbers and it ends there. … She emanated good energy.”

Then came her first-ever TV role as the gumption-loaded ingénue Marion Brooke on The Gilded Age. Produced by Downton Abbey maestro Julian Fellowes, the addictive and adored show follows Marion as she’s taken in by her imperious (but, the show takes great pains to insist, not racist!) wealthy aunts on Fifth Avenue. Fortunes are gambled, and marriages are shattered. There’s a lot of lamb with mint jelly. John Singer Sargent makes a cutie-pie cameo, and you keep waiting for Billy Zane from Titanic to show up. Instead, the show’s filigreed baddies are played by acting legends like Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald.

The whole thing is a blast, and Jacobson knows it — she giddily makes the “zipped lips” gesture when I beg her for Season Four spoilers — but making the show’s first season in 2022 was, she confesses, a trial by fire. Even though she’s a trained Yalie, stagecraft differs dramatically from HBO’s infamously tight camerawork, which is great for dragons and zombies but challenging for actual humans. She was just coming to terms with her queer identity in her personal life while balancing scripts, set dynamics, and 13-hour days in a corset that, at her own insistence, was cinched within emergency-room distance of her intestines. 

“I was learning, and that was a very public way to learn,” she shares. “I’ll say this: I can’t watch Season One back now.” That might be because shortly after the show’s debut, Jacobson did the bravest thing that a modern actress can do: She looked at the comments on Reddit.

“It was kind of like exposure therapy!” she declares. “So many of the things that people were saying about my performance [on The Gilded Age] were basically the intrusive thoughts and voices that I’ve had in my own head since I was really little. I got really depressed. I really doubted my commitment to the work. Like, could I actually do this?”

But being brave is feeling afraid — or sometimes, just feeling like shit — and doing it anyway. So Jacobson slammed her laptop shut and cautiously auditioned for the part of an anxiety-shaken bride in The Materialists, the matchmaking-dilemma film starring Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal helmed by “dream director” Celine Song. She got the part, and began taking stronger steps into her adult, acting self.

Jacobson also took on the role of queer advocate, albeit somewhat warily, in 2024. That’s when she announced her relationship with fashion producer Anna Blundell with a now-dead Instagram post reading “blessed to be entering this joyful New Era bb” with a flame heart and a Pride flag emoji.

“The interesting thing is that I never came out!” Jacobson says of the rainbow-wrapped move. “I never said the words ‘I am a lesbian’ to the press. I posted some stuff on Instagram, like an article about lesbian fashion from the [New York] Times, and the media really ran with it. And so they decided that I was a lesbian.”

But wasn’t she?

“I mean, ugh!” Jacobson says, balling up her hands into little fists like the Arthur meme. “It was a lot for me to handle because I was still figuring out my relationship to my sexuality, and it felt like it got ahead of me. That was hard. But I identify as queer, and I thought it was important. Visibility is so important, and I have seen Kristen Stewart and others just be visible and out, and it’s really inspiring. I don’t think I would have even thought that I could be brave enough to do it had I not seen other people do it. So I don’t think it was necessary for anyone to know who I date, but I feel passionate about the visibility of queer people. It’s normal. Nobody should be hiding, and I wasn’t gonna hide.”

The actress says she had some help and mentorship from Daniella Kallmeyer, the CFDA-nominated designer who calls Jacobson “like a little sister and friend and muse.”

They met through Jacobson’s fashion-obsessed older sibling, Grace — “the shopper of the family,” Jacobson says with an exaggerated sigh — who steered Louisa into Kallmeyer’s boutique on the Upper East Side. “We caught each other’s eye; there was a knowing that was exchanged,” Kallmeyer says. “It’s not about queerness as a political identity, not gay or not. Just a being seen. Shortly after that, she came out.”

She also became a willowy 5’7” vehicle for Kallmeyer’s no-gimmicks lineup of jacquard car coats, burnout silk slip dresses, and leather-on-leather suiting. “She’s truly coming into herself, in the sense of fashion but also identity and career all at the same time,” says the designer. “We chose her as the new face of Kallmeyer because she’s coming into her talent and her identity, which fully aligns with our values. We want to represent that idea of being seen, and seeing people become themselves. That’s a big deal. Also,” Kallmeyer pauses. “Louisa is really fun. She has great vibes. She was the very last person on the dance floor at my wedding. She is the best party guest — but I cannot legally say any more about that!”

Jacobson admits that, like most 35-year-olds in New York City, she loves to haunt vintage stores, cram into tiny downtown bars, trawl across Canal Street in search of kitschy but cool jewelry, and hang out with her friends, a mix of Yale classmates and childhood friends (“my fifth-grade crew!”) that she continues to keep close.  She is also in “constant” search for massage techniques and exercises because of her Gilded Age corset, which “really does leave you with a tight back. I mean, these Victorian standards were insane.”

Jacobson remains close with her sisters — she and Grace even help each other with the grind of self-tape auditions that are increasingly common in Hollywood. “We need more support from the industry about this,” Jacobson insists. “Not everyone has a friend they can call to be an automatic scene partner and videographer. We really need a community solution.” (It’s at this point in the interview that I wonder if after The Gilded Age, Louisa Jacobson should star in a Norma Rae remake or at least run for SAG president.)

And she is now single, although when I ask if she wants to swipe around on Raya, she winces. “I did [Raya] years ago when I broke up with my boyfriend,” says Jacobson. “I was just coming out, and it felt like a safer way to do that. But now that I have done a couple seasons of the show, and I have some standing in the fashion world, I feel a little too… I’m not famous,” she insists, holding her hands up in the universal “stop” gesture. “But I feel weirdly vulnerable. Exposed. And I’m an old-school soul, and I kind of really love meeting people in person and organically. I still have faith in that. Sorry! I’m such a romantic!”

I tell her I am, too, but I picked out my boyfriend on Hinge as if he were a Dries Van Noten skirt on Net-a-Porter. Jacobson giggles but remains resolute in her no-screens policy for new loves. “This is gonna have to be a fate thing,” she says. “But please, show me all the pictures of this guy.”

I take this request — and the fact that both of us are now fully rain-drenched — to ask, again, about The Gilded Age’s upcoming season, specifically the romance of it all. Jacobson seems to scroll through a contract in her mind, figuring out what she can actually share about the hotly TikTok-ed show.

“I’m so proud of the work this season,” she begins slowly. “Everyone is so amazing, which you obviously already know … okay. I can tell you that Marion gets a job in a tenement settlement” — a community center for low-income New Yorkers, especially in immigrant communities, that helped with education and medical care in the early 20th century — “and I can also tell you that total social ostracization is on the line for some people because of a very bad event. The stakes are very, very high.”

Through the rain, I point down Orchard Street to where my grandfather was born in a literal tenement house about a hundred years ago. “Oh wow. We weren’t here then!” says Jacobson ruefully. “We’ve got some Quakers on my mom’s side. We’ve got some Norwegian settlers on my dad’s side. We’re just very, very Midwest!”

I ask Jacobson if that’s why she’s so nice.

“Am I nice?” she asks the air around us. “I don’t know,” she says, turning back to me. Her eyes are bigger than they seem on TV. They appear almost translucent.

“I think I’m just very honest. I think the nicest thing you can be to yourself is just radically accepting of who you are. I think, especially today, we can’t hide ourselves or who we love or what we love. We just have to own it, so that other people can be less afraid of their own stuff. Otherwise, come on. What are we doing here?”

Read GRAZIA USA’s Fall/Winter 2026 Issue