This year, The Gilded Age met the moment and became a bona fide phenomenon. And as the indomitable Bertha and George Russell, Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector took their rightful place as television’s top power couple.
This past summer, as 90 private jets descended on Venice for a billionaire’s wedding, HBO’s The Gilded Age—a relatively niche series about the imagined lives of New York’s aristocracy in the aftermath of the industrial revolution—returned to our screens and inadvertently reflected our absurd cultural times back to us, down to the see-and-be-seen wedding of new elites. As The Gilded Age met the moment, it became the crown jewel of HBO’s famous Sunday-night programming, seemingly overnight.
At the center of the show are Carrie Coon and Morgan Spector, who star as Bertha and George Russell, new-money millionaires threatening to upend the social order of Manhattan’s old money establishment through their schemes and aspirations. The actors, veterans of short-lived but well-reviewed prestige shows, still can’t quite believe how much it’s swept over the culture.
“I’m much more noticed on the street now,” admits Spector, when he, Coon, and I talk. “I think people were just genuinely surprised to see somebody from their show.” (Of course “their” show has several million viewers now.)
There are a few theories to why The Gilded Age blew up in its third season. There’s the show’s oblique mirroring of our own gilded age’s anxieties, in the same way Frank Capra and Gregory La Cava screwball comedies blew up during the Great Depression.
There’s the way the creators could finally rev up the drama and heighten the stakes. For a show where supposedly nothing happens, everything happened this season: bullets flying, corsets tightening, attempted assassinations, a gasp-inducing death, and the rags-to-riches triumph of a humble servant.
But there’s also the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of watching a cast firing on all dramatic cylinders—from Phylicia Rashad to Cynthia Nixon to Ben Ahlers—kill it, scene after scene. Coon and Spector are the beating heart of the show, nailing the nuances of their characters’ despicable behavior while also playing a love match so convincing it’s hard not to root for. In a time of “eat the rich” sentiment, the Russells have become unlikely couple goals—not for their vast wealth but for their common front, the TV marriage built on blood-and-sweat ambition.
Barbara Nitke/HBO
Outside of The Gilded Age, the pair have an inordinate amount in common: They both started out in theater, made their Broadway debuts in the early 2010s, and became bona fide stars in middle age. They also live in upstate New York, are one-halves of creative power couples (Coon to Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tracy Letts; Spector to Passing filmmaker Rebecca Hall), and are parents to young children.
Most of all, they have the same hobby: thinking about the state of the world and going down a doomscrolling rabbit hole. “Which is where you’ll mostly find the two of us together,” Coon says.
Today, for instance, Spector wants to talk about Bill McKibben’s book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization—more light reading to contemplate the end of civilization.
“Last time, you told me to read [the climate novel] Ministry of the Future,” Coon tells him. She flashes a big grin. “I almost jumped off a bridge.”
“I gave you a warning that it was depressing!” Spector parries.
Of course, hanging with the pair isn’t all doom and gloom. There is, for example, the matter of the Coon-Letts household’s now mythic DVD and Blu-Ray collection. “He’s up to over 11,500,” Coon confirms. “With some doubles.”
Thankfully, they’re not the only cinephiles in the house. “[Our son] watched Phantom of the Opera this morning—not the black-and-white, not the silent one, but the next one from the ’40s or something,” she says, referring to the 1943 version.
Recently, Coon’s son and Spector’s daughter both watched Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Meet the Mummy. “Kids’ Criterion [Closet Picks]…that would kill,” Spector says.
Coon and Spector first met on the set of Great Choice, a 2017 horror short written and directed by Robin Comisar about a woman stuck in a Red Lobster commercial (Coon), facing off against a menacing server (Spector). Watching it on YouTube now, it’s striking that even with the absurd premise, you can sense their immediate rapport.
Subject-matter strangeness aside though, it’s odd that they even made it in the first place.
In 2017, Coon was coming off her breakout turn in HBO’s now revered series The Leftovers. Spector, meanwhile, had done Boardwalk Empire and was a year away from his stint on Homeland. Why did two actors busy working in prestige TV decide to do a bonkers short film revolving around shrimp deals?
“Nobody watched [The Leftovers]!” Coon cracks. “I mean, they were desperate to get rid of us. And Gone Girl didn’t really elevate my career in any way. I didn’t have any momentum in my career at that time.”
They were in it for the thrill of working with a new voice. The tonal unpredictability of the short also made something clear, even then: They were both game to get in the dirt with a costar and figure it out.
Years later, when they reunited on the set of The Gilded Age and encountered that same unpredictability, they knew they had an ally in each other. “Oh, here we are again, diving into another tonality that I also don’t understand,” Spector recalls thinking.
That behind-the-scenes solidarity is part of what makes the marriage between George and Bertha crackle onscreen. It’s also what made last season’s cliffhanger so devastating. Disgusted at Bertha’s forcing their daughter into a marriage for social capital, we watch Spector’s George walk out of the marriage with weary finality, sending shockwaves through Gilded Nation.
“The thing I keep hearing is: ‘That cliffhanger!’” Coon says, doing a clutch-my-pearls impression of impassioned fans. “They’re so scared of the cliffhanger and they just are like, ‘You have to save George and Bertha.’ People just really want to save our marriage.”
“It was painful this season to fight,” Coon says. “We kept trying not to fight and everyone kept making us fight.”
HBO
HBO
Do they think the show could really break the Russells up?
“I feel like it’s part of the essential fabric that holds the world in our show together,” Spector says. “But part of me is like, Let’s dive into that for a while and see how it could be…. Obviously, there are reasons people are nervous about it because of the history of the Vanderbilts,” referring to the real-life Gilded Age couple’s scandalous 1895 divorce.
“Well, finding our way back to each other could be really dynamic,” Coon says. “I think that’s where we’re heading. Bertha is not going to give up. I’m not going to give up.”
Today, it must be noted, Coon is proudly wearing a George Russell graphic tee—her go-to for Gilded Age–related press. “Coon, now I feel like an asshole,” Spector says, bashful in his To Die For tee.
To be fair, he did it first—in a mirror selfie that quickly went viral on Gay Twitter, Spector posted a photo in nothing but tube socks and a Bertha tee last year.
Courtesy of Morgan Spector
“I have pants on,” Coon says. “I’d just like to say that for the record.”
“You have a little bit of that: If I love you, I’m going to fuck with you.…” Spector says to Coon.
“Our love language is teasing!” Coon tells me. “Sometimes too far.”
“Cruelty,” Spector concurs. “You’ve hurt my feelings in a way that I appreciate.”
Raymond Ang is GQ’s associate director of editorial operations.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue of GQ with the title “Morgan Spector & Carrie Coon: TV Power Couple of the Year”.
Design by Chris Panicker
