Behind the Curtain
Catching up with a former student and star of HBO's The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector ’02
Morgan Spector ’02 has become one of the most recognizable actors on TV, especially for his starring roles in two HBO series: the adaptation of Philip Roth’s counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, and The Gilded Age. In his senior year at ¹û½´ÊÓƵ, Morgan had the male lead of Benedict in Theatre Prof. Kathleen Worley’s [theatre 1985-2014] production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. A literature-theatre major, he was a student in my ¹û½´ÊÓƵ seminar on Shakespeare’s comedies, and I remember well his requests that we think of the plays we were studying as works for theatre, not just texts on the page. I recently sent Morgan a series of questions about his career—its trajectory from ¹û½´ÊÓƵ, the influences on his work, and the complexities of his acting life.
R.P. How did your time at ¹û½´ÊÓƵ prepare you for a career as an actor (and a producer)? I have in mind not just ¹û½´ÊÓƵ theater, but the liberal arts in general, especially your combined major in literature & theater.
M.S. I had the experience common to a lot of people at ¹û½´ÊÓƵ when I got to college and realized not only that I wasn’t one of the smartest kids in school anymore, but that in the context of my cohort, I was basically illiterate. As an actor this kind of humiliation—one that shakes the foundations of your whole self-concept--becomes familiar. The ¹û½´ÊÓƵ theater department also gave me the opportunity to do some of the most creative and playful work I’ve ever done. I was lucky, because students ahead of me were keyed into the world of experimental theater, put me in their shows, and made me do weird and wonderful shit.
R.P. You have recently played to acclaim two very different major roles: Philip's father in the HBO adaption of Roth's novel The Plot Against America and the robber baron in the HOB series The Gilded Age. Can you say what drew you to these very different characters (different politically, economically, and socially), and how you prepared for such diverse roles?
M.S. I love Roth, and one of my favorite of his books is Patrimony, a non-fiction account of the year leading up to his father’s death. Re-reading it and Plot helped my playing his father Herman, and even though that version was twice removed from reality (fictionalized first by Roth and then again by David Simon and Ed Burns, who wrote and produced the show), I still felt intimately familiar with the character because Roth wrote so much about his family and his father in particular. The first time we met Simon said to me the character I was playing wasn’t a hero, just a guy trying to do the best for his family. It’s freeing to play someone who isn’t larger than life.
Preparing for The Gilded Age was entirely different, because though we have writing and painting from mid-to-late 19th century New York (Sargent’s paintings and Wharton’s writing were both useful as a way into the world they inhabited), there’s not much to draw on in terms of how people’s voices sounded, nor how they moved. I also read a lot about the railroads and the robber barons themselves--Gould and Rockefeller and Carnegie. The book that convinced me any of this was interesting was the memoir King Lehr and the Gilded Age by Elizabeth Drexel, the sad tale of a woman who falls in love with and marries a fortune hunter. She spends the rest of her life lonely and miserable in a loveless marriage she can’t escape. She becomes a brilliant observer of the idiosyncrasies of her class. She made me realize how eccentric, even insane, these characters were, as they tried to one-up each other socially. It was a pleasure to play the character George Russell, who is much larger than life, very clever and dynamic, and with tenderness as well as ruthlessness.
R.P. When you think of classical plays, what parts might attract you, and why? You took a Shakespeare course with me. Were there any characters you studied that you’d love to play? Do you look for characters who seem compatible with your personality and values, or do you seek to stretch yourself into parts that might be diametrically different from who you are?
M.S. I’m a baby when it comes to playing Shakespeare, partly because I haven’t done it in years, and partly because I’ve never felt comfortable acting in verse. I did have a great time playing Benedict in Much Ado at ¹û½´ÊÓƵ, but it’s no coincidence that much of that play is in prose. With verse I’m not confident in my ability not to bullshit an audience. With notable exceptions, my experience watching Shakespeare in performance is that of a play coming in and going out of focus. Some things land and some things don’t, which isn’t shocking given the work is four hundred years old. One thing we’ve learned from living in the accelerated world of online discourse is how specific to a particular era or community language can be; certain phrases evoke whole identities and periods. In many ways, Shakespeare is timeless-the themes of his work are intrinsic to the human condition. He probably defined much of what we call the human condition, at least in English. But the Shakespeare who investigated so many universal human themes was also sensitive to hyper-local and hyper-specific usages. If you read any critical edition you can unearth some of that, but in performance there are a thousand nuances his audience would have understood but I miss, and that makes me feel emotionally remote from the work. On another level, I’d rather see new writers get that precious space in the theater. I’m sure I sound like a philistine and am largely speaking from my own professional anxiety, but at this point I’d need someone to develop a perverse fascination with me doing a particular Shakespearean role and decide they were willing to hold my hand through it. Seems unlikely to happen.
As for your second question, I don’t care if a character’s values align with mine; it’s more interesting if they don’t. I do consider whether the work has a point of view and how I’ll feel standing behind that. I don’t believe I’d take a job I thought explicitly justified U.S. imperialism. I’d rather be part of something that might make the world a little less awful. On the other hand, though I’d argue that the superhero film justifies American empire in a subterranean way that’s even more dangerous, I’d probably act in one. The idea we’re only supposed to do virtuous work is tricky. It’s difficult enough to get any job at all, let alone one that accords with your values. Many great films have reactionary politics, and even the ones that are good for us on some terms might be terrible for us on others, and vice-versa. The best you can do is try to find interesting material.
R.P. You are married to an actor. Since you and Rebecca Hall are both in great demand, how do you balance family and career?
M.S. It is a constant logistical problem. She is also a writer and director, which multiplies the complexity. There’s always the chance we will get a call that means one of us has to move to Australia for four months next week. We have rules about how long we’ll go without seeing each other, and we mostly don’t break them. We’re also very lucky that my mom lives near us and has been part of raising our daughter since she was six months old. That gives us a kind of flexibility without which we couldn’t function. But there’s definitely a tension between work and parenting.
R.P. Your father-in-law, Sir Peter Hall, was the founder of The Royal Shakespeare Company and the Director of the National Theatre. One might say that you married into British theatre royalty. Was that daunting for you?
M.S. I was in grad school at ACT in San Francisco when Sir Peter’s production of As You Like It came through town with Rebecca as Rosalind. She played the verse with utter clarity and simplicity. She was brilliant. Everything about her and that production seemed on another planet. So yes, it was strange to meet her and work with her ten years later and even stranger to end up marrying her. I never really got to meet her father, unfortunately. He developed serious dementia toward the end of his life and by the time I was in the picture he was in no way himself. I spent time with him, but I wouldn’t say I ever got to know him. I had the incredible experience of taking my daughter to the National Theater in London, which Sir Peter, her grandfather, built. She was six months old and she screamed most of the time, but it was still pretty heady.
R.P. You have worked in various media: film, theater, and TV. Has participating in these varied genres been an asset to your skills as an actor? In what ways do you think? Do you have a favorite among them?
M.S. Initially I was much less comfortable on a film or TV set than I was in a theater, but that’s changed now. I’m happy to be acting in pretty much any form, though I haven’t done a play in six years, and I miss that. I suspect working in all three modes is a bit like cross-training. Each one emphasizes a slightly different skill set. Increasingly I think it’s useful to have as many creative practices as possible; they all inform each other even if you’re not equally proficient in all of them.
R.P. Not many actors, relatively early in their careers, become producers, as you did with your documentary on American socialism, The Big Scary “S” Word. How did you get interested in this subject? What is the attraction for you of producing films for TV, or perhaps for cinema?
M.S. I think a lot of people, post 2016, decided to get more directly involved in politics in one way or another. For me, the combination of being excited by the first Sanders campaign and shocked at Trump’s victory led me to want to do something more than I had been doing. Also, like a lot of people who came of political age during the Bush years, I was a disillusioned Obama voter. At first I bought in completely, and then watched as he failed to fight for the public health care option, waged the war on terror, bailed out banks and not homeowners, and formalized a lot of the apparatus for extra-judicial killing. He wasn’t willing to challenge our fundamental political-economic structures, and thus wasn’t able to do anything about the most important issues. That’s why I started thinking about socialism or an alternative form of political organization as a necessity rather than a pie-in-the-sky fringe position. I had been talking to Yael Bridge ’05, a documentary filmmaker, about doing something together; we had gotten to know a couple of people from Jacobin Magazine who were interested in doing something biographical about Bernie Sanders. That idea evolved into a film about the history of American socialism and its resurgence as a viable political movement. It took us longer than we intended, and fundraising for it was an absolute nightmare. There aren’t a ton of socialist philanthropists. But helping Yael shape the edit and being in constant dialogue with her for nearly five years regarding the film was greatly satisfying.
R.P. What has surprised you most so far in your career?
M.S. That I have one at all, honestly. So many brilliantly talented people don’t get to make a living doing this that it can’t be anything but shocking if you do.
R.P. In looking back on your career, what do you think you did to make it all happen? What choices were the most helpful for you, and who were the key people who most influenced you?
M.S. I’m a big believer in sheer accident as a determining factor, including accidents of birth. I’m someone who was able to take the financial risk of a three-year MFA acting program on top of my undergraduate degree in theater, which is certainly a privileged thing to be able to do. Probably the most important single break in my professional life was going on as an understudy because another actor got injured. I was covering a lead role in Arthur Miller’s A View from The Bridge on Broadway, and I ended up taking over the part. I obviously had no influence over that happening, so there was no choice involved, only chance. The thing I did have control over was being ready in case that opportunity happened. You need to be prepared and you need a lot of luck. ¹û½´ÊÓƵ made a big impact on my life: Kathleen Worley was enormously supportive of me as an actor and gave me lots of roles to play and opportunities to figure out how much I didn’t know. The late Melissa Smith, a wonderful teacher who ran ACT when I was there, made you feel you had an obligation to take yourself seriously as an artist, and I needed that.
R.P. In my eyes you join with two other ¹û½´ÊÓƵ graduates as having the most important careers in the theater and TV world: Lee Blessing and Eric Overmyer. Do you think of yourself as part of that ¹û½´ÊÓƵ theater tradition? Do you have a network that includes ¹û½´ÊÓƵies in the theater world?
M.S. That’s very, very flattering, and I wouldn’t say I merit that company. In my head the exchange rate between writing credits and acting credits is about 100 to 1, and those guys have a lot of credits. Don’t forget about Anne Washburn ’91, who wrote Mr. Burns, a Post Electric Play, among many others. I participated in a reading of Anne’s play “Antlia Pneumatica,” which was delightful. She’s a huge deal, in my eyes. I definitely have a ¹û½´ÊÓƵie network, but not many of those folks are in this business. Yael Bridge who directed The Big Scary ’S’ Word and Sasha Leitman ’16 who co-produced it are the exceptions.
R.P. Your paternal grandmother acted in Yiddish theater in New York. Did she have any influence on your decision to act, or on your work?
M.S. She didn’t influence my decision to act, but I do think of her often. She had to stop acting quite young. When I was on Broadway for the first time in A View from the Bridge, she came to see me in the show and said, “This was my dream.” She was visibly jealous, just like an actor!
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