Morgan Spector is holding a dibble—a small wooden tool with a pointed crosscut used to press holes in the soil and plant seeds. His 8-year-old daughter made it in woodshop, he shares over Zoom from his home in rural New York. The earthy simplicity of such an object, I’ll soon learn, suits the flannel-ready actor, who has a woodsman beard and eyes that simultaneously invite you in and seem to get away with something. As the brooding industrialist George Russell on HBO’s The Gilded Age, Spector, with his gallantry and smoldering restraint, has become the object of desire otherwise known as “Railroad Daddy” to his fans. When I ask him about the phenomenon, he grins and says with unperformed humility, “There are many daddies, and I am but one. My time, I am sure, will pass.”
Spector, 45, did not take the obvious path to stardom. His alma maters are Reed College—the famously rigorous, intellectually contrarian liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, from which Steve Jobs failed to graduate—then the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, then years of New York stage work before film and television found him. His screen roles have tended toward a particular type: quiet, stoic outsiders, faintly dangerous in their modes of self-preservation. The FBI agent Dante Allen in Homeland. Herman Levin in The Plot Against America. And now George Russell, at once a ruthless capitalist and tender husband to Carrie Coon’s Bertha. (In the third season of The Gilded Age, though, the couple separates as George decamps to Arizona to expand his railway empire, and are increasingly at odds with each other.)
Spector, politically minded, wasn’t sure he could inhabit a man whose entire existence is the accumulation of capital. For the actor, choosing a role is a bit like choosing a romantic partner. “It was like going on a date with a finance executive and thinking, This is never gonna work,” he says of reading the script and trying on the character. But it did. Playing a robber baron has, if anything, sharpened, rather than softened, his politics. Spector does not see humanizing George Russell as an act of absolution. People are capable of causing harm and structural injustice without being purely evil, he argues, and recognizing that complexity enriches our critique rather than diluting it.
“There are many daddies, and I am but one. My time, I am sure, will pass.”
Spector speaks passionately about politics as an everyday reality—which, for him, it is. He grew up in Guerneville, California, a redwood-ringed town and longtime gay getaway from San Francisco, where leather play, bear weekends, and ACT UP activism coexist with the unhurried rhythms of a place that largely lets people be. His first acting experience came at age 7 with a Jenner, California, theater company rooted in the radical ideals of 1970s San Francisco. Politics, in other words, were part of the landscape long before his became a subject of public debate.
Spector and his wife, actor and director Rebecca Hall, whom he has been married to since 2015, have been notably outspoken about their stances on the war in Gaza and genocide of the Palestinian people, in an industry that has been, for the most part, conspicuously silent. “Signing an open letter or adding your name to something—it just feels like the least you can do,” he tells me. Spector has done considerably more.
Last fall, he traveled to Capitol Hill alongside Congresswoman Delia Ramirez and Cynthia Nixon to lobby for the Block the Bombs Act, which would withhold offensive weapons transfers to Israel. He also appeared in campaign videos for New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani, poking fun at Hamptonites clutching their pearls over the prospect of a socialist mayor—“the Hamptons is basically in group therapy about the mayoral race”—and in 2020, he helped produce filmmaker Yael Bridge’s The Big Scary ‘S’ Word, unraveling Americans’ convictions about the socialist movement. These are not the gestures of someone carefully managing a brand.
“Some artists choose to fight this fight. Some artists don’t. I have enormous love and respect for people who do,” Spector says pointedly but not piously, of his peers who’ve stayed quiet. “The people that don’t—I don’t really think about.” When I ask whether the outspokenness has cost him roles, the self-deprecation returns: “Am I not getting jobs because I’ve been outspoken, or am I not just because I suck? Or because the business is in total decline?” He reserves the bulk of his anger for people with actual political power.
“Some artists choose to fight this fight. Some artists don’t. I have enormous love and respect for people who do.”
Fatherhood has only turned up the volume. Marriage and parenthood are anchoring parts of his identity, predating fame and seemingly insulated from it. It’s no accident that the character he most identifies with across his career is Herman in The Plot Against America: a man reckoning with how much he can actually protect his family in a moment of real political crisis. “That question lingers for me,” he says. “How much can I actually be a bulwark against chaos, and how much am I just one more person being buffeted about on the currents of history?”
Photography by Jeremy Liebman
Styling by Bailey Moon
Grooming by Rheanne White
Photography Assistance by Ryan Carter
Location: The Hancock
Order the Hamptons issue, with Morgan Spector on the cover, here.
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