The Gilded Age Season 3 has introduced us to a whole new Aunt Ada (Cynthia Nixon). Not only does Ada Forte now hold the power and the pursestrings in the Van Rhijn household, but she’s also on a crusade to ban all consumption of alcohol. We learned in the HBO hit’s third season premiere that Ada is now a leading member of the temperance movement, a real-life historic group that worked to end the ill affects of alcoholism by making it illegal for anyone to drink.

The Gilded Age Season 3 has made it very clear where the rest of the Van Rhijn/Brook family falls on the issue of temperance. Agnes (Christine Baranski) thinks it’s ridiculous and prefers to support suffrage, aka women’s right to vote. Marian (Louisa Jacobson) thinks it’s a bit over the top to suggest having a glass of wine with dinner will doom you to hell. Oscar (Blake Ritson) is literally hiding in his room, having the household staff sneak him bottles of whiskey to imbibe in private.

Ada can host temperance meetings in the house and she can argue her positions with her family, but she can’t force them to agree with her. However, she can pressure the staff, who are employed by her, to sign a pledge of temperance. One of the most tense subplots in the last two weeks of The Gilded Age focus on Ada’s assumption that the downstairs staff will just happily sign a very serious pledge to abstain from alcohol.

When DECIDER caught up with The Gilded Age cast a few weeks ago, we asked Cynthia Nixon how much of Ada’s insistence on the staff taking the pledge is done in good faith and how much of it is her secretly testing how much power she now has.

“I think it’s two things,” Nixon said. “I think if you try to look at it in the most charitable way, Ada is a very ardent Christian, and if she believes that drinking is a sin, she believes all these people are going to hell, and she wants to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“But I think, similarly, now that she has this newfound power, I think she actually believes that she can have it both ways.”

Nixon went on to explain that part of Ada’s actions aren’t done out of strategy, per se, but a very Ada-esque navieté.

“[She thinks] she can be their employer and boss and also their friend,” she said. “‘You owe me this as a friend,’ but pretending that she doesn’t realize that she has a very strong economic lever to pull where people’s behavior is concerned.”

Nixon went on to say that she loves this “part” of The Gilded Age Season 3.

“She is wildly enthusiastic, but she also is flexing her newfound economic muscle,” Nixon said. “She’s flexing it and not very successfully.”

Ada might not be very successful forwarding the cause of temperance in her own house, but historically, the movement would start to develop legs. By the 1920s, Ada and her friends would have succeeded in making alcohol illegal. Ironically, these laws would up exacerbating crime and alcoholism, leading to the eventual repeal of Prohibition.

The Gilded Age returns to HBO and MAX this upcoming Sunday, July 13 at 9 PM ET.