Go Behind the Scenes of The Gilded Age with Morgan Spector
The actor shares his favorite photos from the set of the HBO period drama, airing now.
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“George Russell isn’t bound by manners—and certainly not by lack of resources—so he has a lot of freedom,” Morgan Spector says of the railroad magnate he plays on The Gilded Age. “He has the latitude of a very wealthy man in society, but he and [his wife] Bertha are still outsiders. The various homilies the other characters have been saying their whole lives, George is indifferent to them. There’s nothing to constrain him.”
No wonder Spector, who previously appeared on The Plot Against America and Homeland, is having such a good time. Not only does Spector’s character—a very rich man whose fortune can’t buy his family the status his wife so desperately wants—have the rare ability on the series to mix in multiple worlds, but it also gives the actor the opportunity to explore the sort of project he’s never previously made. “Everything I’ve done before has been contemporary or set in a period-ethnic milieu, so when it came to stepping into Julian Fellowes’s world, I wasn’t sure I could do it,” he says. “But it was so exciting to try. In terms of taking on the peccadillos and eccentricities of Mrs. Astor’s 400, no one has a keener eye than Julian.”
Despite the fulfilling work, however, has leaving the first season of the series behind made Spector wistful for the world of late-1800s luxury? “As grand as it is,” he says with a smile, “it’s not necessarily how I’d want to live.”
Here, Spector opens his camera roll to T&C to share a behind-the-scenes look at The Gilded Age, and the moments that didn’t make it on screen.
"This is right after my hair and beard had been done. I usually hate my face, but Sean Flanigan, the hair department head, and Nicki Ledermann, the makeup department head, have just created a look for this guy that makes me feel at home. I was feeling cute, might delete later."
"The last show I did before this was The Plot Against America, where the parallels to contemporary reality were so striking that they increased my anxiety significantly. This series is not like that; this is disappearing into a world of luxury and ease. But this shot is evidence of what it really was to make work in this time. It was a lot harder, especially for the crew. We finished last season thinking 'we did it,' but if we do another season, it’s hard to imagine not doing it with Covid protocols."
"Here's a painting from my pretend house, on the stage in Long Island. I think it’s supposed to be a portrait of my son Larry, but everyone kept saying it looks like me. They would ask, 'is that supposed to be you?'"
"When we were filming in Newport, Rhode Island, I went along the cliff walk. Walking around inside the Breakers, every inch of it is incredibly done and over the top. It’s strange being in these spaces because there was so much competition between these people and so often in real estate and these buildings they threw up just to demonstrate having fuck-you money. That’s one of the complicated facts about some of these people, that they were extremely exploitative but left behind a legacy of architecture that otherwise wouldn’t exist."
"Here's Harry Richardson, who plays my character's son, Larry. He’s a dreamboat. This was the second time we went to Newport, it was the spring and it was gorgeous. We were looking out over the ocean, waiting for our next shot. Some days your workplace is more beautiful than others."
"This is the set for the drawing room in the Russell house. A lot of TV shows are shot in seven or eight days, this one takes 17 to 19 days per episode. It’s a lot of time for an hour of television, and part of what we get to do in that time is really craft the light and color in a room. I don’t think we’re shooting in this room, but using it to bounce light into an adjacent room where we’re actually filming."
"I took this photo on my last shooting day and it was my sort of farewell to the season. Most of the interiors of our homes were shot on set on Long Island, but this shot is in Troy, New York. We took over the town for most of the month of June and transformed the whole downtown. I can't say much more without giving something away!"
Adam Rathe is Town & Country's Deputy Features Director, covering arts and culture and a range of other subjects.
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