Mrs. Bruce

Mrs. Bruce keeps order below stairs at the Russell mansion, running the household staff with brisk, unbending formality. She has strict ideas about hierarchy and propriety among servants, and she enforces them without much warmth, treating her position as housekeeper as a matter of standards to be upheld rather than people to be coddled.

Celia Keenan-Bolger plays her with a starchiness that could easily curdle into caricature but instead feels lived-in, a woman who has built her whole sense of worth around doing things correctly. Against the show's opulence, her clipped exactness with the staff offers a sharp, funny counterweight, and a reminder that rigid propriety runs all the way down the household.