George Russell’s feet are always planted firmly on the ground. Embodied by the handsomely stalwart Morgan Spector, Mr. Russell is not a man that moves easily, especially if someone else is thinks that they know better when it comes to his business and his family at home. Once his mind is made up about something, he will get what he wants even if that means that he will go around you to get it. In the third season of HBO’s lavish, sophisticated drama series, The Gilded Age, George Russell meets resistance in the two areas of his life where he never challenged, and Spector’s performance makes us questioning the state of one of our favorite marriages currently on television.
When George returns home from a business trip at the beginning of this season, the last thing that he wants to hear is about how his wife, Carrie Coon’s Bertha, is struggling with the arrangements of the marriage between their only daughter, Gladys, and the Duke of Buckingham. George promised Gladys that she could marry for love, but Bertha insists that this union will secure a legacy that will extend not just her daughter’s reputation but their family’s as a whole. Rather than tell Gladys to buck up or tell her to push her own aspirations of love aside, George continues to fight for Gladys, and Spector briefly explains how the scenes between him and Taissa Farmiga are important to him.
When George is not at home, his business runs to the edge of ruin, because his ambitions to grow his empire are being (ahem…) railroaded by his closest advisors. In the scene where he fires Patrick Page’s Richard Clay, George puts it quite plainly when he says, “You have neither the vision or the courage to keep working for me.” He says that devastating blow to Clay with a straight face as George sits behind a desk. It’s not personal, it’s business. But if it was personal, George Russell will make sure you know that it is.
At the beginning of our conversation, I told Spector that I was surprised by how much I thought about George’s anxiety level throughout this third outing. Since he is trying to change the world and nearly become a god among men, is he trying to hold onto his control any way that he can? We have surely never seen the Russell house so divided, and the last scene of the season, between George and Bertha, had all of social media aflutter when we didn’t know where the marriage between these two people stands. If George is vying to keep his head above water, he leaves season three making sure that he has access to the nearest lifeboat.
The Gilded Age is streaming on HBO Max.
