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- [00:11]
A
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 three 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. And we invited fans of the Gilded Age to call in with their comments and questions about the season. But since this is an ongoing presentation, we won't be able to take your call 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.
- [01:17]
B
I was sitting. I was. I was upstate. I was at my house. I was at home. I'm trying. The time is compressed, so I feel like it was during COVID but I don't think it actually was. I think it was. It was the previous. It was a few months prior because. Yeah, we were meant to go into production March of 2020 initially. So I guess I got it probably earlier that spring or late winter.
- [01:46]
A
Were you working in the theater? Were you not working? What were you doing?
- [01:48]
B
I was not working. No. I was home being a dad. Yeah.
- [01:52]
A
So you get this script, you read about George Russell. What made him interesting to you?
- [01:58]
B
When I sort of. I got the script and I had a sort of idea of, you know, from Julian Fellowes work from Down Abbey. And I thought, I'm never gonna fit into this world. I don't know how I'm gonna enter it. And my wife was like, he's Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. And I was like, oh, all right, I'll try that. And I don't, you know, whatever that meant processed through my body, my sensibility. It was kind of like, okay, I do get this. There's a structure and a kind of a particular sort of masc to this character that I found interesting and comfortable. And, you know, you audition for something and you don't know whether you're gonna be able to pull it off. Right. And there is something wonderful about auditioning. Cause you get to try something on. And when you try it on, then you go, oh, yeah, Okay, I can do this. And there's some. And when there's, like, an intuitive attraction to a piece of material, I would say that was, like, my first entry point there.
- [02:51]
A
In your mind, did you make up a backstory for George, where he came from, his family?
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B
To some extent. I mean, I. I was told that he was based on Jay Gould, and so I did a lot of research on Jay Gould's biography.
- [03:06]
A
Oh, that's interesting.
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B
And sort of transposed that into George's life. But, you know, 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 sort of come to the fore in the narrative. And so you have to be. You have to have a kind of 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.
- [03:30]
A
Something that you read about Jay Gould which informed you.
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B
I guess one thing I found really fascinating about him, he was born in very modest circumstances. He was born on. 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 Zadduck Pratt, who is. There's a town in Catskill still named after him. But at one point, Jay Gould decided he wanted to take over this tannery.
- [03:57]
A
And.
- [03:57]
B
And there was a dispute about who actually had the right to own it. And Gould rounded up a bunch of men with sticks and guns and took the tannery by force.
- [04:05]
C
Whoa.
- [04:06]
B
Yeah. And they had, like, a pitched battle over who was gonna control this tannery. And there's something about being that kind of business leader who's not that far removed from, you know, power really, coming from the barrel of a gun that I think it was an interesting sort of seed to have in George Russell's background.
- [04:26]
A
Now that you've played George for three seasons, what do you see as his weak spot?
- [04:32]
B
Well, I think actually this season really reveals a lot of some, really, that both George and Bertha are actually fairly myopic when it comes to their own. The limits of their own power and the consequences of their own will. So, you know, George. George's pursuing this transcontinental railroad, and it's. You know, he takes risks that I think a smart business leader wouldn't take a smart. You know, he pushes his own capacities beyond where. Beyond the point of safety. And it's only through blind luck that it doesn't all come crashing down. Really. Yeah.
- [05:16]
A
Once you get the script, once you're back into the game. What's your process of getting sort of both the physical nature of George back and also the psychological nature of George back? Because you're kind of laid back.
- [05:31]
B
Me as a person?
- [05:32]
A
Yeah, you're like a T shirt, jeans, glasses.
- [05:35]
B
Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's true. We're not. But there is. I mean, for me, it's all in the. It is all in the language and what is like, 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. And there's a real learning curve to try to figure out how to support what is kind of heightened language and a heightened way of speaking and a heightened way of moving and doing everything without being stiff and ridiculous and sort of not alive and. Yeah, 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 mean, I always think with actors, it's like, you know, 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. And with actors, we often go, like, long periods without doing our work. And so, yeah, when you come back to work after. I mean, we go a year between shooting, you come back to work the first few days, you feel rusty. I mean, Carrie describes it as putting on a wet bathing suit. You know, you know, it's yours, but it doesn't feel right. And I think that's. It's wonderfully apt. But, yeah, it does take you a little while to get back into it.
- [06:46]
A
We talked to Carrie, who plays Mrs. Russell, Bertha Russell, in, I think, 2023, after season two had wrapped. And I want to play a clip for you about what she said about acting with you. Here's about a minute.
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D
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, you know, and splash hot butter on his face. I mean, it's really ridiculous. And we. So we were thrown into this funny Little production for 48 hours and got to know each other really well. And our Spouses, the great Rebecca hall and Tracy Letts had just made the movie Christine together with Antonio Campos. And so they had been social. And then Rebecca and I got pregnant at the same time. So our kids are the exact same age, their daughter and my son. And so we just became really good friends in the world before Gilded Age came along. And so it was such a delight to know that it was Morgan. It was one of the reasons I took the job. And we just have a real deep love and respect for each other in real life. And that certainly doesn't hurt. And he's a great feminist and basically a Marxist. I mean, 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. But he's a great actor and he's incredibly attractive, which doesn't hurt either.
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A
There's a lot to discuss in that.
- [08:11]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just. Yeah, I do. I adore Carrie. And it is like one of the great pleasures of my life to get to. To do these, to play these characters together.
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A
What was that small film about? Great choice.
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B
It's actually. It's a film by a director named Robin Commissar, writer director named Robin Commissar, who I eagerly await his feature whenever he actually makes it. But it's about addiction actually. It's about the sort of loops that we get into when we're addicted to something and the ways that we sort of struggle to escape those patterns. But the way he chose to represent that was by taking a real 30 second Red Lobster commercial from like 1992 or 1990 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. And then everyone else in the commercial is like trying not to let them escape. It's very funny.
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A
She described you as a feminist and basically a Marxist.
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B
Fair.
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A
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?
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B
You know, it's funny. Not really. And I think there was something like 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. Okay. But as a result of that, we had been doing all this research on the 19th century and the labor movement in the 19th century. And I thought. And also on. Yeah, And I just thought the arrow was incredibly interesting and a sort of under. Understudied, under, you know, like 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. And I thought it would be interesting. I mean, you sort of can imagine the think pieces when you think about a show like this, but you're like, well, great. Like that will spur discussion of these inequalities in wealth and income and of this era of union struggle. I mean, 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. And we did in the second season. So, you know, I think it's exciting to get to play in this era because it was such a consequential period of American history. And. Yeah. Even however you come at it, I think.
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A
Tell me a little more about the documentary.
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B
Yeah, well, it was.
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A
It's on Hulu.
- [10:52]
B
It was. Yeah, 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. Was sort of like a friend of mine, I went to college with a documentary filmmaker named Yell Bridge. And we had been wanting to something together for a while, and then after Trump got elected and after Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary. But socialism was brought back into the mainstream in this enormous way, or democratic socialism. And that had been, you know, that had been a death knell for a generation in American politics. And all of a sudden it was something that was a viable thing you could talk about. And so we thought that was significant. And we wanted to explore the previous iterations of American socialism, what that had looked like here before 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 kind of gave rise to that. I mean, Marx used to contribute essays to the New York Herald Tribune. So there was this sort of international sense in which Americans and even sort of American abolitionists in the middle of the 19th century were influenced by some of that thought. And it's a rich tradition that's part of American history. And that's what we wanted to sort of explore was that there was could be a version, a future version of socialism that was very American, was deeply rooted here, and not something that Felt like, you know, finally the triumph of Soviet communism or something like that.
- [12:22]
A
My guest is actor Morgan Spector. He plays George Russell on the HBO series the Gilded Age. All right, 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 and in this character.
- [12:43]
B
Yeah. It is certainly the essence of George Russell is that duality, which I think you very acutely identified for me, the way I think about it, and, you know, be forewarned that actors are always like, you know, we're not criticizing our characters. We're trying to find the sort of 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, and 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. But we all have a kind of moral community where we are our best selves and where we hold ourselves to a kind of moral standard. And then I think we have a sphere beyond that where we kind of don't. And I think, you know, maybe that's for some people. Maybe that's like people who are, you know, for Americans, it's really important that we have civil rights and that we are, you know, cared for by our government, or at least not like, imprisoned arbitrarily. But for people who don't have American citizenship, those rights don't pertain. Right. Like, I think that kind of compartmentalization happens all over the place and is actually quite ordinary. So, yeah, I think that's. That's the way I've sort of thought about it when it comes to George Russell as well.
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A
Let's talk to Stephen from Queens. Hey, Stephen, thank you for making the time to call, all of it.
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C
Hey, thank you for taking my call, sir. I'm think I agree with your wife. I thought that you came off in the beginning. You kind of remind me more of Ashley Wilkes or Mr. Kennedy. But you have your character have more towards Brett Butler. And I love the dealings he now had, the way he deals with the. The union people that he has to work with. I love the whole. With Ms. Scott, and I knew when I. When the doctor came to the house, I said, the doctor's gonna refuse. And with her family, I love the dynamics between Chris Barinski and her sister, played by Cynthia Nixon, and the children and all of it.
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B
I'M so glad to hear it.
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A
Steven, thank you for calling in.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Steven, 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?
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B
I mean, I think part of it is just the sort of 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. So he's engaged in that battle. And that, I think, is the first thing he thinks about in the morning and the last thing he thinks about at night. And it's ongoing. It's perpetual.
- [15:42]
A
It was funny when we first saw you, it seemed like you were in Arizona, but you were on a stage in Long Island.
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B
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, 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. So there is real photography there as well. But, yes, I did not get to go.
- [16:08]
A
Well, tell me about that a little bit.
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B
Oh, just.
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A
Yeah, I think it's interesting to walk out on a stage in Long island and.
- [16:14]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, right? There's something. There's something quintessentially old Hollywood about it. You know, seeing those facades in the west and the tumble. I mean, we had tumbleweeds. They really had a good time with it. And, yeah, being in an old saloon with your sleeves rolled up, just kind of sweating, it was incredibly hot. It was very easy to pretend we were in Arizona. So, yeah, it was. I've never felt more like, man, I'm in showbiz, than I did walking onto a Western set like that. It was cool.
- [16:44]
A
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?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
But they do differ over their daughter's happiness and what happiness means. What does it mean to Mr. Russell? His daughter Gladys. For her to be happy, to be happy in her marriage.
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B
I mean, 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 is. 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 things. The stakes are different and what power could look like is different. But, yeah, I think he's also. I mean, you know, in the argument with Bertha that plays out over the course of the season about Gladys Future, I think there is a. 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.
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A
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?
- [18:16]
B
I mean, all of it is. The only thing I'm not excited to put on is the shoes. Cause they're very narrow. They've tried, but it's just the way it is. But the rest of the costume is so incredibly tailored. It's so beautifully. I mean, everything is built for us by truly, truly brilliant craftspeople. And so there is. You know, you put on. You just. You know, if you've ever had a custom suit on your body, you just never feel more elegant than you do in that moment. And so that's what we get to do when we put on these clothes. And, yeah, there it's. You know, there's. You wear this kind of waistcoat that cinches your waist and puts you in a nicer posture. You wear these beautiful long tails that lengthen everything out. And so there is this sense of really, you know, you feel like an upright member of society, I guess.
- [19:08]
A
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, take a picture in?
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B
I actually think. I mean, I had not been in the Frick after its renovation. Gorgeous. And it is incredible. And, yeah, I mean, that definitely was a highlight. And I haven't been back yet. We're gonna go do another event there, actually in a few days. So I'm excited to see it again. But also the mansions we shoot in in Newport. I mean, getting to have the run of these places, they're so wild. And I mean, these buildings were built in two years, and every inch of them is carved by hand. You know, you just imagine the sort of armies of laborers that. That. Yeah. And it's getting. Getting exposed to the architecture and design of this period through our show has been really one of the great pleasures.
- [20:09]
A
This text says, I'm wondering how you like filming in Albany and Troy.
- [20:15]
B
I love it. Cause what's the best part about filming in Troy is it's 45 minutes from my house where I actually live, so it's really cool. No, also, everyone has. The community up there has really enjoyed coming to watch what our production team does because they, you know, the first season we were up there, they completely transformed the downtown. I mean, put down sod for the horses and just, you know, all the facades for this around this one particular square were rendered in period. And it's. I mean, it's amazing what we can do in terms of creating these illusions. And 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. So. So that's a delight that we get to share with the wider community of Albany and Troy. And that's actually been really fun.
- [21:04]
A
Has working on the show changed how you walk and you think about New York a little?
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B
I mean, I do find myself walking. When I see, you know, these sort of neoclassical pieces of architecture, I think about, you know, because often you're walking past, like a Duane Reade, and it's in this incredibly beautiful building, and you're like, what was this originally? You know, who built this? What was it? You know, who lived here? What was this originally designed to do?
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A
And.
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B
And so just, you know, getting. Having a little. Having. Having reason to prompt that question, I think has sort of just deepened my relationship with the city a little bit. Yeah.
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A
When you think about George Russell, I don't want to give anything away for season three, but is there anything in season one or two that would be a clue to where things are going?
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B
Oh, that's an interesting question.
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A
A look, a moment.
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B
I think the look at the end of season two, when George starts to put together what Bertha has concocted with the Duke and Gladys. I do think that. I mean, for me, actually, when I saw the cut, I was like, oh, boy, they're setting that up. So, yeah, I think that was a little bit of a preamble.
- [22:18]
A
That was my conversation with actor Morgan Spector. You can see him play George Russell in the Gilded Age on hbo. And season four is slated to begin shooting this spring. Coming up, Julianne Nicholson will talk about the series paradise, which is up for outstanding Drama at this year's Emmys.
- [22:44]
B
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- [22:45]
A
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B
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- [23:13]
A
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