Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Today, some of our most popular conversations about the best TV shows and series from the past year. Let's get things rolling with TV's top railroad baron, George Russell. The Gilded Age returned for its Season 3 this past summer. By this point in the series, George Russell might have conquered New York, but he wants more and has set his sights on the West to expand and unite his business empire. While his wife, played by Carrie Coon, is at home trying to pair their daughter up with a duke, George is hopping around saloons, getting local miners liquored up enough to sell him their land.

Back when the season first dropped, actor Morgan Spector, who plays George Russell, dropped by for a watch party. We invited fans of the Gilded Age to call in with their comments and questions about the season, but since this is an encore presentation, we won't be able to take your calls today. I started by asking Morgan what he remembers about getting the Gilded Age script for the first time back before the series got underway.

Morgan Spector: I was upstate. I was at my house. I was at home. The time is compressed, so I feel like it was during COVID, but I don't think it actually was. I think it was a few months prior because we were meant to go into production March of 2020 initially. I guess I got it probably earlier that spring or late winter.

Alison Stewart: Were you working in the theater? Were you not working? What were you doing?

Morgan Spector: I was not working. No. I was home being a dad.

Alison Stewart: You get this script, you read about George Russell. What made him interesting to you?

Morgan Spector: I got the script, and I had a idea of Julian Fellowes' work from Downton Abbey, and I thought, "I'm never going to fit into this world. I don't know how I'm going to enter it." My wife was like, "He's Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind," and I was like, "Oh, all right. I'll try that." Whatever that meant processed through my body, my sensibility. It was like, "Okay, I do get this." There's a structure and a particular masculinity to this character that I found interesting and comfortable.

You audition for something, and you don't know whether you're going to be able to pull it off. There is something wonderful about auditioning, because you get to try something on.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Morgan Spector: When you try it on, then you go, "Oh, yes, okay, I can do this." There's an intuitive attraction to a piece of material. I would say that was my first entry point there.

Alison Stewart: In your mind, did you make up a backstory for George, where he came from, his family?

Morgan Spector: To some extent. I was told that he was based on Jay Gould, and so I did a lot of research on Jay Gould's biography-

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Morgan Spector: -and transposed that into George's life. One of the things with a show like this is you don't actually have a lot of power over what elements of the backstory will come to the fore in the narrative, and so you have to have a idea of where this person might come from, but also be flexible enough to accommodate new information that might get revealed to the audience as time goes on.

Alison Stewart: What's something that you read about Jay Gould which informed you?

Morgan Spector: I guess one thing I found really fascinating about him, he was born in very modest circumstances. He grew up on a dairy farm. He became a land surveyor by the time he was 15, and then eventually became a tanner, working for someone named Zadock Pratt. There's a town in Catskill still named after him. At one point, Jay Gould decided he wanted to take over this tannery, and there was a dispute about who actually had the right to own it. Gould rounded up a bunch of men with sticks and guns and took the tannery by force.

Alison Stewart: Whoa.

Morgan Spector: Yes. They had a pitched battle over who was going to control this tannery. There's something about being that kind of business leader who's not that far removed from power really coming from the barrel of a gun, that I think it was an interesting seed to have in George Russell's background.

Alison Stewart: Now that you've played George for three seasons, what do you see as his weak spot?

Morgan Spector: I think, actually, this season really reveals that both George and Bertha are actually fairly myopic when it comes to the limits of their own power and the consequences of their own will. George is pursuing this transcontinental railroad, and he takes risks that I think a smart business leader wouldn't take. He pushes his own capacities beyond the point of safety. It's only through blind luck that it doesn't all come crashing down, really.

Alison Stewart: Once you get the script, once you're back into the game, what's your process of getting both the physical nature of George back and also the psychological nature of George back? Because you're laid back.

Morgan Spector: Me as a person?

Alison Stewart: Yes, you're like a T-shirt, jeans, glasses.

Morgan Spector: Yes, it's true. For me, it is all in the language and what is-- I remember the first day that Carrie Coon and I were on set playing these characters, and we felt like we had egg all over our faces. We didn't know how to walk, we didn't know how to talk. We didn't know how to do anything. There's a real learning curve to try to figure out how to support what is heightened language and a heightened way of speaking and a heightened way of moving and doing everything without being stiff and ridiculous and not alive.

I think it took a while in that first season to find that for everyone, but now that we have, I don't know, I think it's a sense of-- I always think with actors, it's like you hear that if jazz musicians don't play for a couple of nights, they start to feel off. They start to feel not at your peak. With actors, we often go long periods without doing our work. When you come back to work after-- Sometimes we go a year between shooting. You come back to work the first few days, you feel--

Alison Stewart: Rusty?

Morgan Spector: Yes. Carrie describes it as putting on a wet bathing suit. You know it's yours, but it doesn't feel right. I think it's wonderfully apt. It does take you a little while to get back into it.

Alison Stewart: We talked to Carrie, who plays Mrs. Russell, Bertha Russell, in, I think, 2023, after Season 2 had wrapped. I want to play a clip for you about what she said about acting with you. Here's about a minute.

Carrie Coon: It'll be no surprise then to hear that I really adore Morgan personally. Morgan and I actually met years before doing an avant-garde short film called Great Choice, in which a woman is trapped in a Red Lobster commercial from the '90s. It's really absurd. It's really funny. I cut out his tongue with a butter knife and splash hot butter on his face. It's really ridiculous. We were thrown into this funny Little production for 48 hours and got to know each other really well.

Our spouses, the great Rebecca Hall and Tracy Letts, had just made the movie Christine together with Antonio Campos. They had been social. Then Rebecca and I got pregnant at the same time, so our kids are the exact same age, their daughter and my son. We just became really good friends in the world before Gilded Age came along. It was such a delight to know that it was Morgan. It was one of the reasons I took the job. We just have a real deep love and respect for each other in real life. That certainly doesn't hurt.

He's a great feminist and basically a Marxist. Politics couldn't be further from a robber baron, but it is fun to engage with him on those subjects, because he's got some strong opinions. He's a great actor, and he's incredibly attractive, which doesn't hurt either.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot to discuss in that.

Morgan Spector: Yes. I adore Carrie. It is one of the great pleasures of my life to get to play these characters together.

Alison Stewart: What was that small film about? Great Choice.

Morgan Spector: It's a film by a writer-director named Robin Comisar, who I eagerly await his feature whenever he actually makes it. It's about addiction, actually. It's about the loops that we get into when we're addicted to something and the ways that we struggle to escape those patterns. The way he chose to represent that was by taking a real 30-second Red Lobster commercial from 1992 or 1993 and imagining a person becoming self-conscious within a 30-second loop and realizing that they're stuck in a 30-second commercial and then starting to try to escape. Then everyone else in the commercial is trying not to let them escape. It's very funny.

Alison Stewart: She described you as a feminist and basically a Marxist.

Morgan Spector: Fair.

Alison Stewart: I thought it was interesting for you because you are playing a robber baron, and I know you have strong political views. Was that ever a concern for you before taking this role?

Morgan Spector: It's funny. Not really. I had been producing a documentary on the resurgence of socialism post-Bernie in the United States, which came out and went on Hulu and is still out there in the world. It's called The Big Scary 'S' Word. As a result of that, we had been doing all this research on the 19th century and the labor movement in the 19th century. I just thought the Arrow was incredibly interesting and a understudied, under-understood period, that it felt like whatever angle we were going to go back and look at the Gilded Age, even through this lens of the robber barons and the richest of the rich, you are looking at part of a system that implies the other part.

You can imagine the think pieces when you think about a show like this, but you're like, "Well, great. That will spur discussion of these inequalities in wealth and income and of this era of union struggle. That was something I spoke about with Julian the first time we sat down, was that it would be amazing to bring the labor struggle story into it. We did in the second season. I think it's exciting to get to play in this era because it was such a consequential period of American history. However you come at it, I think.

Alison Stewart: Tell me a little more about the documentary. It's on Hulu?

Morgan Spector: Yes, it's on Hulu. I think it might have gotten pulled down, actually, recently. These things do happen, your licensing changes, but it's out there in the world still. You can get. I went to college with a documentary filmmaker named Yael Bridge, and we had been wanting to do something together for a while, and then after Trump got elected and after Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary. Socialism was brought back into the mainstream in this enormous way, or democratic socialism.

That had been a death knell for a generation in American politics. All of a sudden, it was something that was a viable thing you could talk about. We thought that was significant. We wanted to explore the previous iterations of American socialism, what that had looked like here going back to Martin Luther King, who was a Democratic socialist, going back to Debs, Eugene Debs, and going back to the labor movements of the 19th century that gave rise to that. Marx used to contribute essays to the New York Herald Tribune.

There was this international sense in which Americans and even American abolitionists in the middle of the 9th century were influenced by some of that thought. It's a rich tradition that's part of American history. That's what we wanted to explore was that there could be a future version of socialism that was very American, and was deeply rooted here, and not something that felt like, finally, the triumph of Soviet communism or something like that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is actor Morgan Spector. He plays George Russell on the HBO series The Gilded Age. This text says, "What is Morgan's analysis of his character's ruthlessness in business and his softness towards his children and the dichotomy between how he can hold both sides in this character?

Morgan Spector: It is certainly the essence of George Russell is that duality, which I think you very acutely identifie. For me, the way I think about it, and be forewarned that actors are always-- We're not criticizing our characters. We're trying to find the internal logic of these characters. I actually think it's completely ordinary the way that George compartmentalizes certain parts of his life. I think he's quite extreme. The consequences of his compartmentalization are bigger than they are for other people because his ruthlessness affects hundreds, if not thousands of people that are affected by his companies.

We all have a moral community where we are our best selves and where we hold ourselves to a moral standard. Then I think we have a sphere beyond that where we don't. I think for some people, maybe that's people who are-- For Americans, it's really important that we have civil rights and that we are cared for by our government, or at least not imprisoned arbitrarily, but for people who don't have American citizenship, those rights don't pertain. I think that kind of compartmentalization happens all over the place and is actually quite ordinary. I think that's the way I've thought about it when it comes to George Russell as well.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Stephen from Queens. Hey, Stephen, thank you for making the time to call All Of It.

Stephen: Hey, thank you for taking my call. Sir, I think I agree with your wife. I thought that you came off in the beginning-- You remind me more of Ashley Wilkes or Mr. Kennedy.

Morgan Spector: Oh, interesting.

Stephen: Your character has more towards Brett Butler. I love the dealings he now had, the way he deals with the union people that he has to work with. I love the whole with Ms. Scott. I knew when the doctor came to the house, I said, "The doctor's going to refuse." With her family, I love the dynamics between Chris Barinsky and her sister, played by Cynthia Nixon, and the children, and all of it.

Alison Stewart: He just loves the show.

Morgan Spector: I'm so glad to hear it.

Alison Stewart: Stephen, thank you for calling in.

Morgan Spector: Thank you, Stephen.

Alison Stewart: Your character has a lot of money, but he's not satisfied. Why does he want to go into the railroads? What is it about him that keeps him unsatisfied?

Morgan Spector: I think part of it is just the relentless drive of any capitalist enterprise to grow and expand and diversify, and the competition that somebody like George Russell would have faced from other industrialists who would have been trying to corner the market and exclude any other competition. He's engaged in that battle. That, I think is the first thing he thinks about in the morning and the last thing he thinks about at night. It's ongoing, it's perpetual.

Alison Stewart: It was funny when we first saw you, it seemed like you were in Arizona, but you were on a stage in Long Island.

Morgan Spector: Yes, that's right. We were on a stage in Long Island. They did actually go out to, I think, New Mexico and get some of those big panoramic views that they could then play with in visual effects. There is real photography there as well, but yes, I did not get to go.

Alison Stewart: Tell me about that a little bit.

Morgan Spector: Oh, just--

Alison Stewart: I think it's interesting to walk out on a stage in Long Island and, "Here I am."

Morgan Spector: It's amazing.

Alison Stewart: Right?

Morgan Spector: There's something quintessentially Old Hollywood about it, seeing those facades, and we had tumbleweeds. They really had a good time with it. Being in an old saloon with your sleeves rolled up, just sweating. It was incredibly hot. It was very easy to pretend we were in Arizona. I've never felt more like, "Man, I'm in showbiz," than I did walking onto a Western set like that. It was cool.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting to think about the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Russell because, in some ways, they have mutual respect for each other. It's also game recognizes game, right?

Morgan Spector: Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: They do differ over their daughters' happiness and what happiness means. What does it mean to Mr. Russell, his daughter, Gladys, for her to be happy in her marriage?

Morgan Spector: I think for him it's really simple, which is he fell in love, he got married to the person he fell in love with, and he loves that relationship. It is the foundation of his life, and he wants his daughter to have the same thing. I think perhaps he is oversimplifying what it is to be a woman in that era.

He's identifying with his daughter in a way that is maybe naive because the stakes are different, and what power could look like is different. In the argument with Bertha that plays out over the course of the season about Gladys' future, I think there is an implicit critique from Bertha of their life together and of George's power as being not quite as glamorous, maybe, as being a duke.

Alison Stewart: When you get back on set, what do you like about your costume? What do you like to wear? What are you excited to put on?

Morgan Spector: The only thing I'm not excited to put on is the shoes, because they're very narrow. They've tried, but it's just the way it is. The rest of the costume is so incredibly tailored. Everything is built for us by truly, truly brilliant craftspeople. If you've ever had a custom suit on your body, you just never feel more elegant than you do in that moment. That's what we get to do when we put on these clothes. You wear this waistcoat that cinches your waist and puts you in a nicer posture. You wear these beautiful long tails that lengthen everything out. There is this sense of really-- You feel like an upright member of society, I guess.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because you've been doing a lot of press for this and a lot of photo shoots, and you've gotten to go to some amazing places. You got to go to The Frick and Sargent in Paris. Was there a favorite place that people have taken you? Have people been like, "Oh, gosh, we gotta find a mansion, and take a picture."

Morgan Spector: I had not been in The Frick after its renovation, and it is incredible. That definitely was a highlight. I haven't been back yet. We're going to go do another event there, actually, in a few days. I'm excited to see it again. Also, the mansions we shoot in in Newport, getting to have the run of these places, they're so wild. These buildings were built in two years, and every inch of them is carved by hand. You just imagine the armies of laborers that that must have taken. Getting exposed to the architecture and design of this period through our show has been really one of the great pleasures.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I'm wondering how you like filming in Albany and Troy.

Morgan Spector: I love it because the best part about filming in Troy is it's 45 minutes from my house, where I actually live. It's really cool. Also, the community up there has really enjoyed coming to watch what our production team does because the first season we were up there, they completely transformed the downtown, put down sod for the horses, and just all the facades around this one particular square were rendered in period. It's amazing what we can do in terms of creating these illusions.

When you're really familiar with the public space looking as a modern place, then you come and find it one day, and it's utterly transformed, I think it's a delight. That's a delight that we get to share with the wider community of Albany and Troy. That's actually been really fun.

Alison Stewart: Has working on the show changed how you walk and you think about New York?

Morgan Spector: A little. I do find myself walking-- When I see these neoclassical pieces of architecture, I think about-- because often you're walking past a Duane Reade, and it's in this incredibly beautiful building, and you're like, "What was this originally? Who built this? Who lived here? What was this originally designed to do?" Just having reason to prompt that question, I think, has just deepened my relationship with the city a little bit.

Alison Stewart: When you think about George Russell, I don't want to give anything away for Season 3, but is there anything in Season 1 or 2 that would be a clue to where things are going?

Morgan Spector: Oh, that's an interesting question.

Alison Stewart: A look, a moment?

Morgan Spector: I think the look at the end of Season 2, when George starts to put together what Bertha has concocted with the Duke and Gladys. I do think that. For me, actually, when I saw the cut, I was like, "Oh, boy, they're setting that up." I think that was a little bit of a preamble.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with actor Morgan Spector. You can see him play George Russell in The Gilded Age on HBO. Season 4 is slated to begin shooting this spring. [music] Coming up, Julianne Nicholson will talk about the series Paradise, which is up for Outstanding Drama at this year's Emmys.