Go Behind the Scenes of The Gilded Age with Morgan Spector

“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.”

WATCH THE GILDED AGE

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.