SPOILER ALERT: Details follow for Season 3, Episode 7 of “The Gilded Age,” “Ex-Communicated,” which aired Aug. 3 on HBO.
On its best days, Le Pain Quotidien’s Bryant Park branch is a far cry from the 61st Street mansion where the Russell family presides over New York society in baronial splendor on HBO’s “The Gilded Age.” And this is not one of its best days — the air conditioning is on the fritz, and the restaurant has installed several massive fans that rumble like locomotives as they do battle with the humidity.
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Morgan Spector has exchanged the 19th century power suits he wears on “The Gilded Age” for a T-shirt and jeans. We were supposed to meet to break down the cliffhanger — his character, George Russell, a rapacious industrialist with a soft spot for his family, has just been shot at the end of the seventh episode of the show’s third season — at the Morgan Library, one of the most prominent remaining Gilded Age monuments in Manhattan. But the museum is closed on Mondays.
“This is a little less grand,” Spector observes. “I don’t think anyone is going to be bringing us high tea.”
After a slow start with a divisive first season, “The Gilded Age” has steadily gained momentum with critics and audiences. Last year, the show’s second season scored an Emmy nomination for outstanding drama series, and the third season hit new ratings highs. This week, HBO announced it was renewing “The Gilded Age.” Spector has experienced the surge of interest.
“I have more people coming up to me in the street — and then there’s all the online discussion,” he says. “It feels like the show caught on in the second season and keeps building.”
Much of that chatter has been about the collapse of the Russell marriage. For the first two seasons, George and his wife Bertha (Carrie Coon) worked in tandem. He amassed the fortune; she spent it to secure their social position. But Bertha’s decision to marry her daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) off to the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb) over George’s objections has damaged their union. In the past, George filled Bertha in on all his corporate struggles. But this season, he’s largely kept her in the dark about his reckless bid to construct a transnational railroad line.
“We’ve painstakingly built, over the course of this season, quite a midlife crisis for George Russell,” Spector says. “There was a sense of he got to the top of this mountain. He can’t really go any higher. Do you go mad? Do you find other mountains to climb that are even more treacherous?”
For now, as George clings to life, Spector discusses the fate of his character and the business rivalries and personal dramas that have left his business empire on the brink of disaster.
How worried should we be for George?
You should be very worried. In the 19th century, gunshot wounds from up close were extremely dangerous. Many people didn’t survive them. I don’t have a contract for next season yet, so who knows?
How did you find out about George’s shooting?
Those final scripts were a little delayed, so it took some time before I got them. But when I read the ending for that episode, I was just thrilled, because it’s such a left turn for our show. It’s totally historically accurate. This kind of thing happened during that era, but it doesn’t feel like ‘The Gilded Age.”
When I read the script, it wasn’t that long after Luigi Mangione shot the United Healthcare CEO. I was like, [“The Gilded Age” creator] Julian Fellowes is clairvoyant. It redoubled my sense that there’s a way that this show, however subtly, however quietly, is really in dialog with our current moment, simply by virtue of there being structural similarities between the two eras. Both of these time periods have massive wealth and massive inequality. Both of them are characterized by industrial titans who are kind of swinging the state around by its tail. The consequences of that can be violence.
We’re meeting days after Jeff Bezos’ lavish wedding to Lauren Sanchez in Venice. It doesn’t feel dissimilar to Gladys’ wedding this season.
That is one of the delightful things about being in this show. You play the eccentricities of this class of people in the 19th century, and then see the same sort of thing play out today where you have another over-the-top wedding that becomes a global spectacle and that is chattered about and written about and becomes fodder for the media industrial complex. It’s the same thing where these wealthy people are using these celebrations as expressions of power and displays of influence.
George and Bertha’s relationship is in a very precarious place throughout this season. Did you see that coming?
I didn’t know how it was going to play out, but it seemed inevitable to me from how the second season ended. I don’t know how many times in the first two seasons George says to Gladys, “I will make sure you marry for love.” It’s like five or six times, so the flag has been planted.
Why does this mean so much to George? He’s a cold and calculating person in business, so why is such a softie when it comes to his daughter?
Those two aspects of his life are entangled with each other. His ruthlessness is justified by his commitment to protect his family and care for his family. That’s how you rationalize driving a man to suicide and going on with your business the next day — the people that really matter, your children and your wife, everything is for them. So in the domestic sphere is where you have to be your best. That’s where you get to be caring and tender.
George doesn’t want Gladys to marry the Duke because she isn’t in love with him. But is there something about the Duke that is also unappealing to George?
I think Carrie and I would disagree about this. I don’t know that Billy, the guy that Gladys wants to marry, is a perfect analog for a younger version of George, but he’s not that far off. The idea that the Duke is so much better than someone like George, there is an implicit critique there of what George has built. That no matter how powerful he is, no matter what edifices he constructs, it’s still not going to mean as much to the people Bertha wants to impress as a 500-year old family estate in England.
Was the gun going off in the first episode when George is in the saloon in the Old West a bit of foreshadowing?
Only in retrospect. We didn’t have those later scripts when I shot that scene, but when I watched that episode later, it’s very much a Chekov’s gun.
In this episode, George finally admits to Bertha that they’re in very precarious financial situation. It’s so different than it was in the first season where he involved her in the decision-making and let her know about the challenges he faced. Why has he shut her out so completely?
Their communication has totally broken down. Ordinarily, they have these kind of chats in their rooms at night and fill each other in on what’s going on. But their rupture over Gladys has stopped that from happening. And Bertha is caught up in her goals to the exclusion of all other things too.
Are the qualities that made George so successful — this relentless ambition and appetite for risk — the same things that are undoing him this season?
Yes. His by-any-means-necessary drive has succeeded so many times, but that formula isn’t always going to work. He probably should have paused on the railroad expansion, but I also think he was distracted. His marriage is not going well. His relationship with his daughter is not going well. He’s kind of a mess in this episode. He’s wagered more than he should have. There’s a lot of internal disappointment at the way he’s failed Gladys. There’s a lot of internal disappointment over his own stupidity in terms of risking more than they have.
It turns out that financial salvation comes from Larry discovering that the mines that George dismissed as a necessary acquisition in order to get his railroad through, are actually quite valuable. Is his son becoming a worthy successor?
George wanted to mold Larry in his image. But Larry has been a dilettante. He’s tried out a few different identities and possible career paths, and now finally, he has circled back around to the family business, and it turns out he has a fair amount of talent for it. That’s quite satisfying for George. At least he has one child that he hasn’t let down yet.
It sounds to me like the cast and creative team feared they would not get a third season. Were you concerned you were going to get canceled?
We were all on five- and six-year deals. During the strike, all of our contracts lapsed and that was also a period of incredible tumult in the business. There was that great Netflix correction, and there was a lot of structural challenge in the business, and we knew our show was very expensive. A lot of us felt like the fact that our contracts lapsed was an indication that we were on the edge. And then during the second season, towards the second half, all of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh, there’s an audience for this show that we weren’t sure was going to find us.’ There was this sudden groundswell of interest. When we got the call to come back, it was incredibly exciting because we all love working together.
A criticism of the show was that nothing happens. But this season there have been weddings, divorces, shootings.
The show is ‘The Gilded Age,” right? It’s a 30- or 40-year period of American history. The need for world building when you’re telling a story like that on a canvas that large is enormous. And so the whole first season, or much of the first season, was about introducing all these characters and letting you remember their names and their jobs. When you’re telling a big story like this, it’s like writing a 1,000 page novel. The first 100 pages are all about establishing who this or that person is. And now we’re getting to paint on that canvas. Part of what’s fun about the show is that the stakes of very small gestures can be very high. That’s why these period dramas are exciting. They are the drama.
You’ve become a sex symbol thanks to “The Gilded Age.” What has that been like?
It mainly comes down to the character. There’s something about a guy who is both powerful and and caring and loving to his family and his wife that’s attractive. When an audience is engaged with what you’re doing, that’s all you can ever really want. For that reason, it’s fantastic. But it’s like everything in this business — it’s fleeting, but it’s flattering.
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