Ben Ahlers gets a hero’s welcome when he arrives at the Horological Society of New York on a sweltering Wednesday at the end of July. The organization’s petite midtown museum is calm and powerfully air conditioned, like the special corner of a college library perfect for cranking out a term paper. A few tourists examine displayed artifacts like a centuries-old pocket watch in hushed tones, while employees celebrating a birthday split a small cake amongst themselves. When Ahlers appears — several minutes late, ironically, owing to traffic — in a fashionably oversized shirt, the staffers greet him like an old friend, rushing to offer slices of cake and water bottles to help him cool down from the heat. The 28-year-old plays the bumbling footman John “Jack” Trotter on HBO’s The Gilded Age, and in the latest season, Jack’s idea for a mechanism that would improve alarm clocks has made him rich beyond his wildest dreams. They congratulate him on his character’s success, as well as that of the show itself, which has just been picked up for a fourth season. “Thank you,” he says, brushing off the attention. “People are really enjoying the clock.”

It’s really that the clock, and Ahlers himself, have become the subject of enthusiasm both ironic and earnest from fans of the Julian Fellowes–created drama, which ports over many of the conventions of the British upstairs-downstairs costume drama to late 19th-century New York. When introduced in season two, Ahlers’s plotline was among the sillier developments on an intentionally fluffy show, sandwiched between scenes of striking railroad workers and opera-house battles. Among the staff of the old-money van Rhijn household, headed up by sisters played by Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon, Jack was an amiable, if largely background, presence, notable mostly for his strong New Yawk accent. (Ahlers himself speaks with standard, if still richly resonant, American intonation.) But as Jack’s clock patent started to show real promise, Ahlers found emotional depth in the storyline, making him a character easy to root for. The active and very online fandom of the show has taken to referring to him as “clock twink,” owing to his signature invention, along with Ahlers’s rumbly, old-fashioned line deliveries and adorably naïve mien. (Contra the stereotypical stature of a twink, Ahlers is tall in person but open-faced in a way that does convey the energy of a small baby deer.) Unlike the always-full coffers of the old-money upper crust and bickering robber barons, Jack personifies The Gilded Age’s ability to tell an American rag-to-riches story: He’s a truly self-made man — well, self-made with good connections. It helps to meet the son of an industrialist willing to fund your project.

Ahlers has made multiple appearances at the Horological Society since his character started tinkering with timepieces to combat his chronic oversleeping. Along with Gilded Age producer Luke Harlan, he took one of the society’s watchmaking classes before season two (the organization is name-checked by its original German title, Deutscher Uhrmacher Verein, within the series), so the tour of the library we receive from the scruffy and bespectacled executive director, Nicholas Manousos, is mostly for my benefit. Ahlers peppers Manousos with questions, eagerly pointing out a stabilized timepiece on display that was used by the British navy aboard their ships, which in turn was crucial for determining accurate positioning at sea. “You could pin the entire British empire on the back of that clock,” Ahlers says. (He later tells me he watched a lot of History Channel with his dad growing up.) “That’s a little bit of an extrapolation,” Manuosos responds, “But I think it’s valid.”

In season three, with the support of Harry Richardson’s nouveau riche scion Larry Russell, Jack sells his invention for $600,000, or somewhere near $9.5 million in today’s dollars. The sum is as unbelievable to the character as anyone else — Jack is mostly silent during the critical negotiation scene, but Ahlers brings a sweet comedy to his wide-eyed reactions. HBO audiences are primed for worst-case scenarios from their Sunday-night dramas (as in the brutal The Last of Us, where Ahlers challenged his onscreen image this spring, playing a ruthless soldier under the command of Jeffrey Wright’s Isaac), and some fans speculated that poor innocent Jack might be taken advantage of by the son of a scheming railroad tycoon. But most things tend to work out for the characters of The Gilded Age, and Ahlers never suspected otherwise — “Maybe it’s just because Harry and I are such good friends.”

The back half of the season follows Jack’s uncertain adjustment to being rich. He buys a townhouse and leaves behind his found family, including the kindly German chef Mrs. Bauer (Kristine Nielsen) and sterner maid Armstrong (Debra Monk). In his touching final scene of the season, he invites his longtime love interest, Bridget, played by Taylor Richardson, over for a dinner where she can eat with him as a guest, not a servant. It’s a big and, as Ahlers describes it, emotional change for both actor and character. In playing a footman, it was his job to stand in the background of many scenes as a tertiary figure, making the occasional polite interjections and pouring tea. It allowed him to meet the many great theater actors who passed through the household’s doors, both upstairs and down. “We had Nathan Lane coming through, and Kelli O’Hara and Donna Murphy,” he rattles off. “I was listening to Robert Sean Leonard and Cynthia Nixon talk about their early days Off Broadway.” He gets goosebumps thinking about filming Jack’s final days downstairs and having to bid the colleagues he worked with every day good-bye. “I feel really excited and nervous for him,” Ahlers says. “He has to participate in the real world now and also figure out how to continue to include the people who raised him.”

Jack’s triumph has coincided with a burst of popularity for The Gilded Age, the go-to comfort show for an unsettling summer. Like a lot of the younger members of the cast, Ahlers happily reposts memes about the show (viral moments of the season also include O’Hara’s “geegaws” and a fateful carriage accident), though he tells me he’s trying to figure out a better way to process the attention. In recent weeks, he’s been focusing on filming his next project, a Netflix comedy that stars John Cena and Eric André, and spending time with his girlfriend. He’s installed Brick on his phone to keep himself from checking it all the time. “The clock twink stuff is so fun, and then at a certain point it’s a dopamine feedback loop,” he says.

Ahlers comes across as a lot savvier than the babe of the woods he plays on HBO, but you can feel a lot of Jack’s own enthusiasm in talking to Ahlers. He started acting as a kid in Fort Dodge, Iowa, a city of 25,000 northwest of Des Moines. His parents were lawyers, but his mother also performed in local theater, and he grew up watching her before they started performing together. She was Belle in Beauty and the Beast and he was Chip the teacup; later they did Songs for a New World and Into the Woods. She died a year ago while Ahlers was filming this season of The Gilded Age, and he’s thankful for the support of his cast members while facing the challenge of processing “the heaviness of my own personal life in a fantasy world.” While Ahlers liked acting, the idea of doing it for a living never seemed viable. Plus, he was so busy with sports: He played football, basketball, tennis, and track in high school, and he was aiming to get recruited to Division II or III football in college. “From there, I figured I could just move to Chicago and make money and live a nice, modest midwestern life,” he says. But when he was 15, he heard about an acting camp offered by Broadway Dreams. There, he got encouragement from Tituss Burgess and Rachel Hoffman, a casting director at Telsey and Company, the major theater firm that also happens to cast The Gilded Age. She helped him apply to the theater program at the University of Michigan. “My parents had no connections or insight, and I was like, I just want to try this,” Ahlers says.

In college, Ahlers got the musical-theater training Michigan is famous for (alums include Gilded Age castmates like Celia Keenan-Bolger, as well as songwriters Pasek and Paul). He can sing — his voice hasn’t been showcased on The Gilded Age, but fans have found clips of his performances online — yet when he first got to school, he felt out of depth surrounded by the intensity of the other musical-theater majors. “We were all the most charming performers in high school, but I don’t know if any of us could act,” he says. He focused on doing student films and plays to hone his dramatic craft; that led to a gig at the Williamstown Theater Festival in the summer of 2018, where he performed alongside his future Gilded Age castmate Louisa Jacobson, then left college a semester early to play a British boyfriend on an NBC show called The Village — “there was no dialect coach, I had no idea what I was doing” — and finally got the audition for The Gilded Age.

Between seasons of television, Ahlers has carved out a promising theater career. In Baltimore earlier this year, he starred as John Wilkes Booth in a new play from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, which Ahlers says is aiming to come to New York. Last winter, he put together a small-scale staging of the beguiling Philip Ridley play Tender Napalm in a tiny performance space in New York with his friend Victoria Pedretti (of Netflix’s You), in which he gave an impressively spiky and raw performance as one half of a couple facing down catastrophe. “I think we can get caught up in chasing the perfect career,” Ahlers tells me, adding that he considers someone like Timothée Chalamet the model for his generation of actors. But his impulse to do that play came out of wanting to be “anti-precious,” he says. “I just wanted to do a weird play with a great actor for 60 people a night, just because.”

Ahlers was 24 when he started filming The Gilded Age, and three seasons later, after the disruptions of the pandemic and the WGA-SAG strike, he’s now a few weeks away from 29 — he calls his time on the show the MFA he never had. Jack has his fancy new digs now, but Ahlers is pretty certain he’ll be back next season, given the conversations he’s had with the show’s producers and Fellowes’s abiding interest in what Jack represents as a version of the American Dream. The circumstances will just look very different, he says. “I know I won’t be pouring tea every day.”

 The Gilded Age’s “clock twink” loves the memes, but he’s trying to look past them.