Before he goes back to work as the patriarch in “The Gilded Age,” actor Morgan Spector had an opportunity to stretch his wings with a role in “I Don’t Understand You,” a comedy with Andrew Rannells and Nick Kroll.
As the English-challenged Italian Massimo, he tries to get through to the Americans on their Italian vacation. The language barrier? Deadly.
“I had a wonderful coach who was Italian, and she was extremely patient, both with my dialect and my actual pronunciation,” Spector says. “I studied Spanish in high school and a little bit in college, so I thought, ‘Oh, it’s a Romance language, they’re both Latin-based. I’ll be fine.”
Instead, double consonants made it “incredibly difficult because they’re pronounced differently. Americans elongate vowels. We don’t elongate consonants … that was tricky.”
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When Italians watch the film, “they’ll elbow each other … ’stupid Americans’ … but my hope is they’ll say, ‘Yeah, you tried.’”
Getting to do a comedy like “I Don’t Understand You” is possible, Spector says, because he has a mother willing to help when he and his wife, actress Rebecca Hall, are both working.
Luckily, “there’s a nice balance in a year, where you do some TV, maybe do an independent film, maybe do something a little bit larger,” the California native says. “It’s tricky at times. It’s always a balancing act.”
And two acting careers in one household? “We’ve mostly gotten pretty lucky where my periods of being really busy have coincided with periods for her where she’s not as busy. There have been times when one of us has to say no to something or when we have to say, ‘OK, we’re going to pull our daughter out of school, and we’re going to hire seven nannies and go live wherever it is.’”
Spector and Hall met on the Broadway play, “Machinal.”
“We were artistic comrades before we were romantically involved,” he says. “That capacity to work together and sort of partner creatively has always been sort of the DNA of our relationship. It’s lovely when we do get to work together.”
When Spector saw the script for “I Don’t Understand You,” he realized it was “sort of a rare jewel where you’re working with friends.” Directors Brian Crano and David Joseph Craig “have been good friends for a long time and I would do anything with them.” That they comment on what it means to be American in the world is key. “The script is brilliant,” Spector says.
So what message does that send to Americans traveling abroad? “Find a small country pizzeria with a single, lonely proprietor and try not to kill them,” he says with a smile.
This month, he returns in the sprawling period drama, “The Gilded Age,” as George Russell, the “new money” robber baron who works his way through American society, circa 1880.
The series is part of that “lucky” game plan Spector enjoys.
“I Don’t Understand You” is now in theaters; “The Gilded Age” returns June 22 on HBO.
