The Gilded Age star Morgan Spector asks: ‘Straight guys can’t bottom?’
Spector said in a recent interview: "We’re living in a moment now where we’re exploding ideas of gender"
By Gary Grimes
Morgan Spector, star of HBO period drama The Gilded Age, has raised eyebrows after recent comments he made regarding straight men’s ability to bottom with the best of them.
In a recent profile on GQ Hype, Spector was asked about a comment he made during a Los Angeles Times roundtable in 2024 in which he said: “I’m very much creatively a bottom. Tell me what to do and just let me obey.”
Reflecting on the remark and the discussion it caused in its aftermath, Spector told GQ: “I just made a joke, that’s really what it is!
“I like being able to use my intuition and my intelligence to plug into somebody else’s ideas, learn their language, learn their way of communicating, figure out what the thing is that they’re trying to make, and then deliver that,” he clarified.
“I guess it’s more of being a service top, creatively, than being a bottom.”
When it was put to him that some people interpreted the original comment to be queerbaiting, Spector suggested that such language is not exclusively queer.
“Straight guys can’t bottom?” he responded with incredulity. “I mean, people can play with dominance and submission in heterosexual relationships. We’re living in a moment now where we’re exploding ideas of gender. We deconstruct, these things are not fixed…. It’s theater, baby. We’re all playing in the same sandbox in a certain way.”
Spector has been married to Vicky Cristina Barcelona actress Rebecca Hall since 2015 after meeting whilst co-starring in a Broadyway production. The couple share one child, a daughter named Ida who was born in 2018.
“He’s not afraid to challenge what our preconceptions are about masculinity,” – Carrie Coon on Morgan Spector
Elsewhere in the GQ profile, the actor’s Gilded Age co-star Carrie Coon commented on his relationship to masculinity. “He’s not afraid of the gender spectrum,” Coon said.
“He is at once hypermasculine, and also one of the most in touch with his feminine side I’ve ever met,” The White Lotus actress continued. “He’s not afraid to challenge what our preconceptions are about masculinity. He’s just really always complicating the conversation in such a beautiful way.”