Morgan Spector Is Dressing Deliberately and Watching the World Closely

I’m on the Zoom waiting for Morgan Spector to join when the words “hateful little device” pops up on the screen. The actor answers the call while I’m laughing, and immediately smiles. “Oh, yes, that’s my iPhone’s name,” he tells me. “I find it both incredibly useful and absolutely fucking loathsome and distracting. It's one of those things that you're like, I want to throw it across the room and buy a flip phone and never text anyone ever again, but that's impossible, for a variety of reasons.”

Clearly, the Gilded Age star isn't afraid to express himself. And that's equally true when it comes to what he's wearing to the Thom Browne show he's attending during New York Fashion Week not long after our chat. “I'm wearing this long black pleated skirt with a pocket and a sweater vest,” he says. “And then this very long black coat with military buttons. It feels very goth by way of Thom Browne, somehow. It's cool. I'm excited about it.”

But not every day is a runway show. “I live in the country, not the city, so it doesn't feel appropriate to be absolutely buttoned up and dressed to the nines when you're just dropping your kid off at school,” Spector says. “So lately I’ve been dressing deliberately.” An example of this? Stylized bagginess. “These looser silhouettes are coming back, and they're just very easy to wear. It’s that kind of thing where you’re relaxed, but you’re sophisticated. I could wear that look if I’m at home in upstate New York or in the city and still feel like I’m telling a story about myself that I can stand behind.”

We move from modish takes to more political ones, having a conversation that orbits around the worlds of fashion, fatherhood, and fundamental beliefs. And let me tell you this: Spector is truly spectacular.

On Thom

I went to the Thom Browne show last year, which was set on like a distant alien planet. It sort of felt like it was inspired by The Little Prince. And it was just this crazy, visionary piece of theater. It was amazing. It was nothing like any show I had been to before, and it really made me think, “Okay, there’s a creative vision here that’s bigger than fashion that is expressed through clothing.” It was surrealist and brilliant, and I’m excited to see what he does this year. I have not been steeped in the world of fashion my whole life, but I do like clothes, and I'm interested in what an outfit does to a person’s identity almost instantly—and I'm always impressed when I’m just watching the shows and the people walk down the runway in the clothes. Like how much narrative and story there is around these garments and people. Coming from theater and the world of narrative fiction, film, and television, I’m always impressed with how evocative these relatively simple displays are.

A Hot Take

I think Jon Stewart should run for president. It's like my sentimental millennial embarrassing take. I mean, I don't know what other options we have right now, to be honest.

But for Real

I'm watching the United States just facilitate horrible violence all over the world. Particularly in Palestine, but all over the planet. And I wish that wasn't what our country stood for. I wish we weren't that place. I wish we were the country that was helping people stay alive and not helping people get killed. I think it's just very hard to go through every day as an American knowing that your tax dollars and your representatives are making that happen. I find that increasingly difficult to live with.

As a Father

I had a parent-teacher conference the other day, and my daughter's kindergarten teacher said that she's very securely grounded in her own individuality. And I just hope she maintains that—that's my wish for her, for little baby me when I was her age, and for everybody.

Hateful Little Device

I think like many other people I have a phone addiction because I do so much work on it, and it’s just so much a part of my life as a professional. Even social media has become part of the job—promoting and making connections with people via that medium. I'm living in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to this device and the impact it has on my life.

A Few Words

A friend recently recommended a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union called Secondhand Time, which I've been really enjoying. It’s an oral history of the period after the fall of the wall. So it's interviews with all of these people who lived through the moment after the Soviet Union ended, and it's mainly people describing their lives under communism. This one woman talks about her childhood, being a young adult and an artist in that period and being part of a group of people who were watching the government do the things that they were doing and feeling like they couldn't do anything about it. She says this line that really stuck with me: “We were living our lives with our fingers crossed behind our back.” And there's something about that that really resonated right now, maybe especially for people who make their living in the arts. That one's been rattling around in my head lately.

Queued Up

I'm in a film called I Don't Understand You with Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells. It's going to premiere at South by Southwest in a month. I'm very excited. I play a rural Italian guy with an amazing mustache and mullet. It's a fun part.

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