hose theater kids really know how to put on a show. The 79th annual Tony Awards took place on Sunday, hosted with surprising aplomb by recording artist Pink. And in a bit of theatrical synergy, days before Pink sang the immortal lyrics “gitchie gitchie Carrie Coon,” Coon herself and Morgan Spector, her onscreen husband, dropped by Little Gold Men for a joint interview about their hit HBO show, The Gilded Age. The two, who portray ruthless new-money New Yorkers Bertha and George Russell, are currently knee-deep in filming season four of the historical drama,
“Four seasons is the most of any one thing I’ve ever done, so it’s really fun to get to play with the permutations of who these people can be at this point and see how far we can push them,” says Spector. Coon agrees, though it’s taking her longer than it once did to reimmerse herself in Mrs. Russell’s elaborate outfits: “I found acclimatizing to the corsets and high heels and hairstyles particularly hard.”
Below, Coon and Spector talk about how The Gilded Age reflects modern society, the trials and tribulations of Bertha and George’s marriage, and how they use their own real-life marriages—to Tracy Letts and Rebecca Hall, respectively—as fodder for their performances.
It really feels like season three is when the show broke containment, reaching beyond its original audience of theater-loving, history-loving people. What do you think it was about this most recent season that struck a chord with a larger audience?
Morgan Spector: To be honest, you have to commit to shows these days in order to find an audience. There is so much stuff that people say to themselves, I’ll get to that eventually. And by the time they get to it, it’s gone. It’s been canceled because they didn’t get to it, or if it’s a movie, it’s not in the theater anymore and their box office wasn’t good enough ’cause you didn’t go. For studios and networks, they really have to give things some breathing space to find an audience.
So that’s one thing. But also, I think season three was exciting. Season three, narratively, had a lot going on. Yes, you’re getting your snide remarks, and yes, you’re getting micro-moments that resonate in a way that they wouldn’t necessarily in our contemporary lives. But you’re also getting actual big-time drama. And I think that combination was fun and that brought in more people.
Carrie Coon: I will say, too, it’s a cross-generational show. I meet so many moms and daughters who watch it together, people who watch it with their grandparents. If you want to engage with the seeds of where we are now, you can. And if you just wanna not think about that part and just look at costumes, you can. It can either inspire you to get curious about New York and the history behind the Gilded Age, or you can just really enjoy some costumes and melodrama.
In many ways, we’re in a second Gilded Age period now, where the robber barons of yesteryear have been replaced by tech autocrats. Do you think that’s part of the reason that the show has really struck a chord with viewers?
Spector: I think it’s just structural resonance, right? It’s two periods of alarming inequality. I don’t think the show is necessarily setting out to investigate that. This is the era of Jacob Riis and How the Other Half Lives. This is the era of people really waking up to what tenement life was like. We’ve dipped into that a tiny bit, but that’s not really where this show’s interests lie. The resonance between today and then is so exact that it’s unavoidable. So the show ends up having this subversive, trenchant wit about it in the way that it sort of juxtaposes these two time periods.
Coon: That’s what art can do when it’s reflecting the world back to you in that way, but with some artful distance.
Obviously, it’s historical fiction, but there’s a lot of real stuff in there. Now that you’re on your fourth season, are you still learning things about this time period?
Spector: For me, it’s the business stuff: how these guys were making money and how they were trying to get over on one another. That part of it is always fascinating, ’cause these guys were innovating in completely unregulated areas. It’s much like AI, right? I’m sure in 50 years we’re gonna look back and think, How did we ever allow them to be unregulated given all the harms that they could do? There’s a tremendous amount of financial chicanery that goes on in 2026. But back then, there were just no guardrails, so these guys could be wildly inventive. They succeeded in crashing the economy several times, sort of single-handedly. It was a wild time.
Bertha and George are at the forefront of that as these sort of disruptors into the established New York scene. For the vast majority of The Gilded Age that we’ve seen, they’re peas in a pod. But at the end of season three, cracks begin to show, and our favorite couple begins to fray and fissure. What was it like playing that arc last season?
Spector: We were sad.
Coon: We like their marriage too. We like the respect and the mutual ambition and all of that sexiness. But it was hard. As actors, it was hard to do that ’cause we really like each other, and we like working together. I think. I hope I’m not just speaking for myself [laughs].
Spector: Yes [laughs]. Both Carrie and I, we’re both a little proud of our marriages. You know what I mean? We’re both a little proud of our partnerships, and the way we each nurture each other’s lives and try to create that possibility for our partner’s fulfillment. Getting to bring what we know in our own lives into this fictional marriage was really satisfying for both of us because it just felt really authentic.
Coon: I still found it really, supremely relatable. I celebrate 13 years of marriage this year, and I have two kids. Marriage over the long term, it’s not easy. My husband in real life is 15 years older than me, and he is going through different things. He’s 60 and I’m 45. Those are really different places to be in life. When George has his near-death experience and is in a spiritual crisis, that experience is not accessible to Bertha.
They have this gulf between them that feels very real, like something that really does occur in marriages when your partner is maybe going through some big paradigm shift—as we all do—and you can’t quite catch up to them there yet…. To me that was something I could relate to in the season, at least. I could really get my hooks into this idea that Bertha’s just feeling really left behind where George is psychologically and spiritually. But it has been confirmed for her that she’s in the right relationship and the right marriage, and that she almost lost him, and that she will do anything to make sure she never loses him again. And he’s not there yet.
Morgan, do you draw anything from your own experience?
Spector: I’m also 45 and getting to this point where you’re not young anymore, right? You’re not a young man. Let’s say you’re in the prime of your life [laughs]. You’re generously halfway through, and you have to kind of think, I’ve done it a certain way thus far. Am I gonna keep doing it the same way? Am I who I wanna be for the next half of my life? You know, I haven’t been shot [laughs]. But there’s a sense in which George’s kids are leaving, right? A huge part of his identity has been taking care of his daughter, being his daughter’s protector, and now she’s gone. The Gilded Age is creating a more dramatic version of this, but this is what happens when you get older and your kids leave and your life starts to change. I can definitely relate to that sense of—not midlife crisis exactly, but a sort of midlife spiritual investigation.
Coon: Also, it’ll be a long time before Morgan and I are empty nesters. Our children are so small. We’re gonna be such old empty nesters.
Spector: We’re old parents, it’s true.
Coon: Old parents. It’s gonna be a long time.
