NEW YORK >> “The Gilded Age,” HBO’s 19th century series from the “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes, begins Season 3 June 22 highlighting parallels between the show’s 1880s boomtime New York and today’s Gilded Age of billionaires.

Fellowes, 75, and his co-writer Sonja Warfield clearly chart the connections between the two eras.

“Certainly, when we were making Season 2,” Fellowes said at a Manhattan hotel “Gilded” press conference, “we were very conscious of the fact Elon Musk and whoever it was were racing each other to the moon. Do you remember with their rockets and all this sort of stuff?

“They didn’t actually have rockets in the Gilded Age. But if they had, that’s exactly what they would have done.

“We were conscious that we were in another kind of ego world where we’ve been playing with this idea that the ego world was waiting just below the surface to come bouncing out again. I think we’re living in the middle of that now.

“Politically,” added this Conservative House of Lords member, “the world is so strange at the moment that it’s almost impossible to say who you’d vote for anymore. Everything is so changed.

“We were both conscious of that. Also, there are certain things (and I think it’s the job, in a way, when you’re making a period drama) to point out what’s the same. There’s a lot that’s different. Our responses are different. The rules of society are different, and so on.

“But there’s a lot that’s the same, in terms of the way we hurt each other. The way we scheme and how we care about our own prestige.

“There are many parallels between the Gilded Age and now. But (to Sonja) do you think that’s about right?”

“I think so. There are universal themes for human beings, whether it’s love, death, marriage — all of that. So even though those people were around in the 1880s, those are still the themes that we live out today.”

But didn’t those robber barons do wonderful things, like Henry Clay Frick’s jewel, the Frick Museum? Or Andrew Carnegie who funded libraries and gave away 90% of his wealth at the end of his life?

“Putting a fine point on it,” Warfield said, “that was at the END of his life.”

“It is a very interesting thing,” Fellowes added, “that at the end of a lot of these lives, they suddenly thought, ‘Jeepers! How am I going to be remembered?’ And they started their art collections, library donations, concert halls and all the rest of it.

“I’m not speaking against it. But I don’t think it really gets to what they were given for. They were given to make us remember them differently from the way that they were.”

“The Gilded Age” Season 3 streams on HBO and Max Sunday