Morgan Spector

Herman Levin reads the newspaper aloud at the table and argues with it. That is the first thing to know about the character in The Plot Against America (2020), and it is the first thing to know about Morgan Spector, because he has a way of making a man's opinions look like something he has owned for years. He has a big, level voice, a heavy face he keeps still, and he does not play doubt at the start of anything. Whatever his people believe, they believe it before the scene begins.

That habit took a while to find a lead. He came to the screen from the stage, and for most of a decade television used him in the parts that stage voices get: Frank Capone in Boardwalk Empire (2013), Dante Allen in Homeland (2018), criminals and officials, men standing near power and looking as though they belong there. He is in Christine (2016) as Dr Parsons, and we did not remark on him at the time; the film is Rebecca Hall's, and the supporting parts exist to hand her reasons. Then Simon and Burns gave him Herman in their adaptation of Roth, and he has since become George Russell, the railroad magnate of Julian Fellowes's The Gilded Age (2022–).

Herman is the performance to start with, because it shows what the stillness is for. Spector plays an insurance man whose confidence in his country is total and has never been examined, and the work is in how that confidence comes apart in stages: a shout at the wrong moment, a silence at dinner. We found the silence harder to watch than the shout, because shouting is something Herman knows how to do and the silence is not, and Spector lets you see him not knowing. Zoe Kazan's Bess sees the trouble first and cannot make him listen, and their kitchen scenes, several of them about nothing more than whether to look at a house in another neighbourhood, are the best marriage we had seen on screen in a good while. It is a lead built out of listening badly, and it is the most exact thing he has done.

The Gilded Age we have not reviewed, so we will not judge it here, but the casting is worth a word. Spector has said of the part, "This is an Ellis Island face. There's nothing aristocratic about me." He is right, and it is why it works on paper: the men he plays best are the ones whose certainty looks slightly borrowed, and a self-made magnate among old money has the same thing to prove that Herman had.

The risk is plain. Television found his type late and has used it steadily since, and a man who plays authority well can spend a career being handed authority. What we would like to see is the other thing: a part that starts unsure, with no paper to argue with. Until then, watch him fail to listen to Zoe Kazan across a kitchen table.