“I’ve Seen People Comment Online, ‘I Watched Him In This Other Thing Without His Beard, And I Was Like, “Ugh!”’”: Morgan Spector Is A First-Class Gentleman

He has brought gallantry and glamour to screens as The Gilded Age’s new-money magnate George Russell (aka “Railroad Daddy”). As its fourth season commences, marking his most extensive screen role to date, the leading man takes his performance to darker, unpredictable territory, while his career continues to hurtle full-steam ahead.

As self-made railroad tycoon George Russell in HBO’s decadent period drama The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector has commanded our screens – and many fans’ fantasies – in the fictional take on a canonical chapter in the American dream. Though velvet, silk and cold, hard ambition are the backdrop in its 1880s industrial New York, the moral woes at the heart of The Gilded Age are far from resigned to history. George is a doting father, loving husband and a ruthless capitalist whose empire is built upon exploitation. It’s a familiar seduction with which we continue to reckon, and Spector wears these contradictions in his performance like a fine suit.

Yet the California-born actor’s charm is cut from a different cloth. One that couldn’t be further from the character he has now dedicated four seasons to crafting. His warmth, eloquence and dry sense of humour underline a refreshing lack of pretension. Though he is a leading man, a fashion mainstay – having graced the Met Gala’s steps in Willy Chavarria and Tom Ford in recent years – and colloquially the internet’s “Railroad Daddy”, when he is home, Spector leaves the circus at the door. He and his wife, the English actor and filmmaker Rebecca Hall, whom he has been married to since 2015, have an eight-year-old daughter, Ida. “Whatever you were doing all day, she doesn’t really care that much. She just wants to hang with you and see you as her parent, so that always snaps you right back into reality.”

Portraying a robber baron in such a high-profile TV domain has also brought Spector’s priorities as an outspoken democratic socialist into sharp relief. He and Hall have been vocal about the war in Gaza and what scholars and UN bodies have described as a genocide against the Palestinian people. He has travelled to Capitol Hill to lobby for the Block the Bombs Act, prohibiting the sale of arms to Israel. He also appeared in campaign videos for New York’s now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani, playfully poking fun at the Hampton elites being put off their lobster salad at the prospect of a socialist mayor governing the city. And he co-produced the 2020 feature-length documentary The Big Scary “S” Word, which chronicles the history and future of the American socialist movement. His Willy Chavarria suit for his 2024 Met Gala debut was a red tuxedo emblazoned with poppies: a symbol of the Palestinian people and a call to honour the dead with peace. “It’s important we keep talking about it, keep drawing attention to it, keep screaming about it,” he says. 

Spector grew up in Guerneville, California: a gentle, rustic resort town and countercultural haven nicknamed the “Gay Riviera”. He was raised in the wake of the legacy blazed by 1970s LGBTQ+ advocacy and resistance, where politics wasn’t something to be opted into but the substance of everyday life. Spector’s first acting experience came at the age of seven in community theatre – and in life and in work, his hometown’s spirit of tolerance and self-expression is the torch he has carried.

Suit, turtleneck, and boot HERMES

He would go on to classically train at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and his eventual move to New York City in 2006 ignited a Broadway career which, in a steady slow burn of honed craft, has led to him becoming one of television’s leading prestige actors. His screen roles tend toward a particular character: dignified and impassive, underpinned by a ruthless commitment to protecting their image. Notably, he has played Herman Levin in The Plot Against America, New York gangster Frank Capone in Boardwalk Empire and the FBI agent Dante Allen in Homeland. 

The commencement of The Gilded Age’s fourth season marks a landmark in that career, however. This is the longest Spector has ever stayed with a single character. “There is a process of figuring out the rules of a character,” he explains, “and once you know them and you lock in your intentions, you can live in their fiction and forget who you are. That is really a luxury. I find that the relationship with the characters and my ease with the parameters of who they are deepens over the course of time.” So much so that when, for a new role, he shortened the robust but refined corporate beard that is synonymous with George and has been sported by Spector between seasons, he barely recognised himself. “It took me three weeks to get used to my face again.”

We speak while Spector is in Prague during a rare pause in his schedule between filming for that very role as Robert Langdon in Netflix’s series adaptation of Dan Brown’s 2025 novel The Secret of Secrets. He plays opposite his wife in their most in-depth shared project together – he a Harvard professor and symbologist, and she a missing scientist whom he must rescue to recover a high-stakes manuscript which will change the world’s perception of the human consciousness.

Spector met his wife when they performed together in the 2014 Broadway revival of Machinal. To work with her so closely on film is “unimaginably fortunate”. He speaks reverently of her craft: “I think Rebecca is one of the great living actors, actually. I get to go to work with her, and I get to learn from her, and have a front-row seat to her work… She’s also somebody who is so fundamentally truthful as an actor that she can start messing with your capacity to believe in what she’s doing. She can give performances that are of characters who aren’t persuasive as people, which to me is a level of meta complexity and social observation that I would never dare approach.

Playing a new character, for Spector, is like breaking ice with a stranger. “You’re encountering yourself again in a way that can be sometimes frustrating. It can be a nervy process,” he notes. “You’re still navigating the question of, ‘How much of myself gets to come into this world, and how much do I need to invent something?’ That process is interesting and intricate, and one I always find challenging.” And, despite having three seasons of The Gilded Age in his rearview, the knot of George remained a tough one for Spector to untangle in its fourth act, as the character is led to darker, unforeseen plains.

(Left) Jacket and trousers LORO PIANA (Right) coat, shirt, trousers, and shoes CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION

The glamour and gallantry curdled when George was shot at the end of Season 3. The near-fatal assassination attempt instead exposed a vulnerability and emotional distance in his character, which led to the fracture of his family in its finale. “You want to balance familiarity with surprise and novelty,” says Spector of his character’s evolution. “As strong as he is in the world of business, what we really come to learn about George now is that he relies on his family, and his relationship with Bertha [his wife] is a stabilising, tethering force. In Season 4, we’re seeing someone who is really, to some extent, reeling as a result of all of that coming apart.”

There are lessons in George that can be applied to understanding the real-life figures and fixtures of economic life in the 2020s. Nearly 150 years have elapsed, but American society continues to have an incredibly high ceiling but also a very porous floor. “I think there’s just a pervasive sense that no one is taking care of you,” shares Spector on his society today. “If you become ill in America, you could lose everything. When you look at the experience of the ordinary person and contrast it with the idea that a single individual can be worth a trillion dollars, it’s obviously obscene. As much as our show is escapism, I think what makes it juicy escapism is that it does bring us back to the reality we’re living in now in a certain way.”

When it comes to the billionaires, tech moguls and oligarchs who have a hand in dictating those disparities, “I have to say, I’m not interested in them personally,” Spector notes. “They all seem to be pretty boring, unfunny and unattractive people,” he says. “But what’s interesting about them is that structurally they occupy this position that requires them to act in a certain way according to a certain set of incentives, and that’s what I see drives George in his business behaviour, right? He is a pure capitalist and unapologetic about responding to those incentives. But what’s interesting is how he’s still able to consider himself a moral person in his personal life because he draws a big, bright line between these two sides of himself. I think that does allow us some insight into these contemporary figures because I’m sure they compartmentalise in similar ways.” 

Spector has always rejected the parables of bad and good that we tell our children. Human nature is classically far messier and more indistinct. “It impoverishes our imaginations from an early age,” he says. “People do bad things not because they are essentially bad, but because of the incentives that exist within a person’s framework of reality. I think one fun thing about our show is how it illuminates the way that somebody in his position must compartmentalise between an inhuman response to capitalism’s imperatives and how they think of themselves as ordinary people.” 

Though Spector confronts reality so unflinchingly, what attracts him to a role, chiefly, is the promise of fun. “The world is pretty grim in a lot of ways right now, and I find that when I’m engaged in work that isn’t giving me enjoyment and just wants to grab me by the back of the head and rub my face in suffering, I’m like, ‘We’re doing this every day, and if there isn’t some aspect of pleasure here, what are we doing?’ I’m not saying I’m drawn to things that are fundamentally frivolous, but I think increasingly I want there to be a bargain with the audience that if you give me your hour, we’re going to offer you some pleasure.” 

Take a dive into the subreddits devoted to The Gilded Age, and the swooning reactions to Spector as their ‘Railroad Daddy’ show Spector is more than delivering on that promise (“He could derail my locomotive anytime he wants”, goes one Reddit comment). He accepts his sex symbol status in good spirit, but on the other hand, he caveats “It doesn’t really have anything to do with me” – a sentiment which has been shared in interviews with television’s other leading heartthrobs before him, including Jon Hamm as Mad Men’s Don Draper and Idris Elba as the titular Luther. “If your performance captures people’s imaginations in a certain way, you can only be grateful to connect to an audience that way,” he says. “But it can also be revoked. I’ve seen people comment online, being like, ‘I watched him in this other thing without his beard, and I was like, ‘Ugh!’ It’s really not about you and who you are in your actual life. It has to be a thing like, ‘Oh, the sun is shining today, that’s nice. Tomorrow it might not be, and that’s cool too.’”

Vest, trousers, belt, and shoes PRADA

The world is all aboard the Morgan Spector train, and his career is not only deepening as a leading man, but broadening – he’s also appearing in Venice-selected sci-fi animation Moonfish opposite Lucy Liu, which premiered in September.Behind closed doors, Spector still has to make an effort to remember to be gentle with himself. “I realise that doesn’t come naturally to me,” he reflects. A beginner to meditation, he reminds himself to breathe; with his wife and daughter, he is simply Morgan. “I think that’s something I bring into my acting: a real harshness toward myself, a severity of judgement. I want to be more explorative and say, ‘I’m finding out, and we’re all finding out together.’ Maybe that’s a much more interesting or productive way to create, and it’s exciting to be in a place of change.”

The Gilded Age Season 4 premieres on November 1 and releases weekly on Sundays on HBO Max. 

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