Categories Billions Helen Interviews Personal and Family Life Print Media

Damian Lewis and His Wife Helen McCrory Crack the US Showbiz Lifestyle – April 8, 2019

Ping-Pong, Dressing in Drag, and More Details About Those Guitars!

by Gabrielle Donnelly | Express | April 8, 2019

BOBBY AXELROD, the hedge fund manager at the centre of the financial drama Billions, is brutal, thuggish, ruthless and dangerously sexy. In other words, he’s a complete animal – or not, depending upon which side of the Atlantic you live. According to Damian Lewis, who plays Axelrod, he has noticed a marked difference between the reaction of American audiences to his character and the British.

“I think we can all agree that Bobby is corrupt,” he laughs now, affectionately, of the Billions character, Bobby Axelrod.

“He’s an old-school scrapper, a gangster, an alley cat: his motto is, ‘Why use a scalpel when you can use a sledge hammer?’

“But on the other hand, it turns out that in some ways he’s also quite progressive and quite liberal in his political views.

“That’s what makes him fun. It’s interesting to me that when I’m walking down the street in New York and someone recognizes me, they’ll go, ‘Yeah! Bobby Axelrod!’ ‘Yeah, love you, man!’ But when it happens in England, people go, ‘Oh. Bobby Axelrod. You’re a real ****hole!’

“I’m not quite sure exactly what that says about both places but it says something!”

Lewis, 48, knows a bit about both England and New York these days, since he spends his time commuting between New York, where the series is shot, and London where he lives with his wife, actress Helen McCrory, and their two children, Manon, 12, and Gulliver, 11.

“We work it out,” he shrugs of his ever-travelling schedule.

“We actors are all gypsies and we all have to travel for work.

“I have friends who have bought a house in LA and been very excited – It’s great! I’ve moved the whole family to LA and it’s going to be so good! No more travelling!’

“And then they find they get three years of work in Toronto or Vancouver or even back in London! We just muddle through somehow.”

He admits that, constant jet lag and the proceeds of Billions and other series such as Homeland, Band Of Brothers and Wolf Hall have all helped make life pretty comfortable for the Lewis household.

Continue reading Damian Lewis and His Wife Helen McCrory Crack the US Showbiz Lifestyle – April 8, 2019

Categories Billions Interviews Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Print Media

Damian Lewis: Financial Times Interview – April 5, 2019

The ‘Billions’ star on schooldays with David Cameron, playing conflicted characters — and rumours of 007

by Janan Ganesh | Financial Times | April 5, 2019

“What am I?” demands Damian Lewis, in the Yonkers vowels of Bobby Axelrod, the hedge fund manager he plays in Billions. “Chopped liver?” We have not fallen out. It is the presence of the item on the menu that sets up his riff on the Americanism.

The actor you also know as a Renaissance king (Wolf Hall) and an al-Qaeda convert (Homeland) is seated under a wall-mounted ram’s head in Fischer’s, a portal into antiquated Mitteleuropa on London’s Marylebone High Street, where it all but heckles the modernities around it. From a room that suggests an Orient Express dining carriage, Lewis looks out on to a Diptyque, an Aesop and a Bang & Olufsen as I ask him why British actors do so well in America. “It’s luck, it’s innate, it’s a bit of hard work,” he guesses. “It’s nothing to do with being classically trained.”

He admires Christian Bale (“There’s something quite extreme innately in him”) and vies with Tom Hiddleston and Idris Elba in the bookies’ guesswork as to the next James Bond. Politely, he smiles through my thesis that Brits grow up hearing more accents than almost any other nation, honing an ear for them that amounts to a thespian advantage. If he is not quite sold, he is at least open to the idea of performance as a national trait. “Is there a clown in the British character that there isn’t in America? I think there is. There’s a clown in us somewhere.”

Continue reading Damian Lewis: Financial Times Interview – April 5, 2019

Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis Talk ‘Billions’ – March 28, 2019

Damian Lewis: From Billions to Steve McQueen

by Rueban V. Nepales | Inquirer Entertainment | March 29, 2019

“Honestly, I don’t think I would want a billion dollars,” claimed Paul Giamatti, costar of the financial drama (it’s a lot more interesting than that description), “Billions.”

The hit Showtime series also stars Damian Lewis as a hedge fund billionaire, so our recent talk inevitably veered toward green bucks—lots of it.

“It freaks me out; seems like a huge, crazy burden,” added Paul, one of the finest actors around, in his answer to a question on what he would do if he had millions of dollars. We were in New York, where the series is set.

In “Billions,” his longest-running stint in a TV show which is loosely based on a true story, Paul started as a ruthless US district attorney, Chuck Rhoades, out to get Damian’s Bobby “Axe” Axelrod on charges of insider trading.

In the show’s recent premiere of Season 4 , the two adversaries have become allies. The series makes New York’s world of high finance, organized crime and politics exciting—with whip-wielding sex thrown in.

Damian Lewis

For his part, Damian said: “It continues to be thrilling to work with Paul. It’s quite overwhelming the first time you’re in a scene with him. You just know immediately you’re not going to be anywhere but right in the zone with him during that period of filming.

Continue reading Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis Talk ‘Billions’ – March 28, 2019

Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Billions Star Damian Lewis on What a $2,000 Cashmere Hoodie Feels Like – March 24, 2019

Guitars, Cashmere Hoodies, and More

by Hunter Harris | Vulture | March 24, 2019

The most important question I had for Billions star Damian Lewis was this: Are Bobby Axelrod’s cashmere zip-up hoodies as soft as they look onscreen? We can talk about his Rob Ford movie and everything else later, but the hoodies must have their moment. Billions is a show about the dramatics of Wall Street’s rich and powerful — fancy restaurants, words like “devalue” and “quant” — but Axe’s hoodies signify everything that makes his character simultaneously the best and the freaking worst. He’s brash and cool, and so grossly willing to show it off just for fun. And so, I ask Lewis, does a $2,000 cashmere hoodie really feel like a $2,000 cashmere hoodie?

He repeats my question to me, just to make sure he’s heard it right, and then groans: “Oh. They’re so soft. It’s just one cashmere heaven to the next.”

The tables have turned in Billions’ fourth season — Axe is no longer butting heads with Chuck Rhodes (grumpy icon Paul Giamatti), who for three seasons has been his perma-nemesis — but Lewis still says he’s having as much fun with its dramatics as ever before. Ahead of Sunday night’s episode “Arousal Template,” we talked Axe and Chuck’s alliance, the world’s most famous Billions fan, and, of course, that cashmere.

A lot of the dynamics that were central to Billions have been inverted this season: Axe and Chuck are in cahoots. Taylor, once Axe’s prodigy, is now his nemesis. Has that been weird for you?
It’s very exciting. I think it’s also quite realistic, the way in which alliances are made and don’t always last too long. Billions is about the transactional nature of the rich and the powerful, or even modern-day living. It’s a show about the favor trading that goes on, the ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ If the parameters don’t exist, really, like they do for normal people, let’s do each other a favor to get me what I want, to get you what you want. You’ve got a juicy drama of alliances and betrayal ahead of you. Chuck and Bobby have set this alliance because they both need it.

Continue reading Billions Star Damian Lewis on What a $2,000 Cashmere Hoodie Feels Like – March 24, 2019

Categories Billions Broadcast Media Guest Appearances Interviews Video

Damian Appeared on CBS This Morning – March 22, 2019

Billions Bad Boy

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 22, 2019

Award-winning actor Damian Lewis is known for his role as cut-throat hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod in the hit TV show, Billions. In the new season, Axelrod finds himself on the same team as his one-time nemesis, former U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades, who’s portrayed by Paul Giamatti.  Lewis says, “The sheriff is now in cahoots with the cowboy.”

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Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Brian Koppelman Talks Retribution In Fourth Season Of Billions – March 21, 2019

The Characters Are Willing to Go Very Far in Order to Exact Revenge

by Dave Gil de Rubio | Long Island Weekly | March 21, 2019

David Levien and Brian Koppelman shooting season four of Billions.

In a day and age of consumerism and major wealth disparity, Billions serves as the kind of series that holds a mirror up to the excesses of Wall Street and the one percent. Centered on the legal battles waged between rogue hedge fund managers and federal prosecutors, the Showtime drama stars Damian Lewis (Homeland), Paul Giamatti (John Adams; Sideways; Straight Outta Compton) and Maggie Siff (Mad Men; Sons of Anarchy). The three respectively play Charles “Chuck” Rhoades, Jr. (a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York), Robert “Bobby” Axelrod, the billionaire manager of the Axe Capital hedge fund and Dr. Wendy Rhoades, wife of Chuck and in-house performance coach at Axe Capital.

When the series completed its third season, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Waylon “Jock” Jeffcoat (veteran character actor Clancy Brown) ousted Rhoades while former Axelrod protégé Taylor Amber Mason (Asia Kate Dillon) left Axe Capital and poached some traders in the process. The end result was an intriguing alliance between the two male leads, whose characters had previously been bitter rivals. It all makes for an intriguing season four, in a plot that is a high-stakes chess game fueled by the combination of sharp writing and impeccable acting. The series is shot on locations throughout New York City and Long Island.

Continue reading Brian Koppelman Talks Retribution In Fourth Season Of Billions – March 21, 2019

Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Towards Darkness: Billions Star Maggie Siff Gets Candid – March 20, 2019

Wendy Rhoades: So Powerful Without the Bitch Title

by Michael Idato | March 20, 2019 | Sydney Morning Herald

As TV couples go, Billions‘ Wendy and Chuck Rhoades are a little out of the ordinary.

By day Wendy is the confident in-house performance coach at Axe Capital, encouraging her boss Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) to ever greater heights of financial chicanery.

At night she goes home to Chuck (Paul Giamatti), the US attorney determined to bring down Bobby, with whom she engages in Bondage/Discipline-Sadism/Masochism (BDSM) role play, with Wendy in the dominant role and Chuck as the slave.

It is, admits actress Maggie Siff, a lot to take in.

“Maggie, the psychotherapist, analysing Wendy, would probably say that both of those relationships are terrible for her in terms of her discovering her highest self,” Siff says.

“I think both of those relationships have driven her to towards darkness and in her desire to stick it out and help each of them succeed and ascend, she’s paid a price.”

Continue reading Towards Darkness: Billions Star Maggie Siff Gets Candid – March 20, 2019

Categories Audio Billions Guest Appearances Interviews Podcast

Listen to Damian on Podcast ‘The Moment with Brian Koppelman’ – March 19, 2019

The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 19, 2019

It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Here is Damian Lewis discussing the road that got him to Billions and more on Brian Koppelman’s podcast, The Moment. Enjoy!

Find The Moment with Brian Koppelman on iTunes, Stitcher, Pod Bean, Spotify, and Player FM.

And here’s a bit of reading between the lines of some highlights from The Moment by JaniaJania on Fan Fun with Damian Lewis.

Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Why the Creators of Billions See the Show as a “Rorschach Test” for the Trump Era – March 16, 2019

“It’s hard to find the people in positions of power who don’t at least dance with hypocrisy”

by Tonya Riley | Mother Jones | March 16, 2019

Billionaires, Saudi investors, political favor-trading —it sounds a lot like the basis of a Mother Jones article on any given day under the Trump administration. But in fact, it’s the logline for the season premiere of Showtime’s Billions, a surprise hit that is as comfortable being part of the Golden Age of television as it is commenting on a politically turbulent time.

The show stars Paul Giamatti as Chuck Rhoades, former US Attorney for Southern District of New York, and Damien Lewis as Bobby Axelrod, an unorthodox, up-from-his-bootstraps-sort-of hedge fund manager at Axe Capital. They’re joined by Maggie Siff as Wendy Rhoades, wife to Chuck and psychoanalyst at Axelrod’s company; she further complicates their relationship (and often calls the shots for them both). The drama, which was loosely based on the legal battle between Preet Bharara, a former US attorney for the same district Rhoades serves in Billions, and billionaire Steve Cohen, a hedge fund manager who escaped indictment despite being at the heart of a massive insider trading scandals, has evolved over four seasons into must-watch television that evokes the politics of today without the didactic morality of, say, an Aaron Sorkin venture. The show is smart, sexy, and dark, and vest-wearing finance bros and media hipsters alike count themselves among its fans.

Mother Jones called up co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien in advance of season four to discuss America’s fascination with the rich and powerful and how they keep their show fresh in the mercurial age of Trump.

Continue reading Why the Creators of Billions See the Show as a “Rorschach Test” for the Trump Era – March 16, 2019

Categories Audio Billions Interviews Podcast

Damian Lewis on Brian Koppelman’s Podcast – March 16, 2019

The Most Requested Guest Who Hasn’t Appeared…Until Now

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 16, 2019

Exclusive! Our team and other Billions fans have been asking show-runner and co-creator Brian Koppelman when he was was going to have Damian guest appear on his podcast, The Moment with Brian Koppelman. I know our team has asked Brian when Damian would guest appear on a consistent basis.  We got a hint this morning when Brian tweeted:

The most requested guest who hasn’t appeared yet? 2015? (when Billions started) Surely that’s Damian our team thought!

Continue reading Damian Lewis on Brian Koppelman’s Podcast – March 16, 2019

Categories Broadcast Media Interviews Print Media Video

Kelly AuCoin Almost Passed Up the Opportunity to Play Dollar Bill on Billions – March 15, 2019

Kelly AuCoin On Billions and Playing Dollar Bill

by DJ Sixthsmith | CBS Local/CBS Sacramento | March 15, 2019

Aucoin, who plays Axe Capital’s Dollar Bill Stern, had to be convinced by his friend and actor Michael Kelly to take the part. Let’s just say the decision ended up working out for him.

“I auditioned for one role initially and didn’t get that, but they called me back for this character called Dollar Bill,” said AuCoin in an interview with CBS Local.

“This would’ve been such a huge mistake, but I initially said I don’t want to do that. It didn’t even say it was a potential recur, it was a one-off.”

“Over the weekend I thought about it and I was like his name is Dollar Bill and he’s the cheapest millionaire in America, there’s something to this guy.”

AuCoin says it would’ve been the worst decision of his career if he passed up this past.

Season four of “Billions” returns Sunday and Dollar Bill will be a series regular for the first time. His character has come a long way since the first season.

“I didn’t do a ton early on, but even in those small little sections it was a blast,” said AuCoin. “It was very fun to play and the group gets along so well. We started building this family from day one.”

Continue reading Kelly AuCoin Almost Passed Up the Opportunity to Play Dollar Bill on Billions – March 15, 2019

Categories Billions Interviews Print Media

Billions EP Previews What’s Next for Axe, Rhoades & the Crew in Season 4 – March 15, 2019

Axe: The smartest Guy in Town was Blindsided

by Ileane Rudolph | TV Insider | March 15, 2019

A thirst for vengeance drives both hedge fund king Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) on Season 4 of the financial thriller Billions.

The longtime antagonists join forces to crush those who betrayed and weakened them at the end of last year. “We explore the lengths that characters will go, and how it makes them feel when they encounter the residue [their actions] leave,” says executive producer David Levien. Here’s a look back at where the main characters left off, and a peek at the wrath they’ll unleash to regain their power.

Bobby “Axe” Axelrod

The smartest guy in town was blindsided by Taylor Mason (Asia Kate Dillon) when his equally brilliant protégé left Axe Capital and started a competing fund, stealing clients along the way. “Axe feels he brought Taylor to prominence, only to be burned,” says Levien. Now he will use his own fortune and that of a new buddy, private equity queen Rebecca Cantu (Nina Arianda), to destroy Taylor. And in return for aiding Chuck, Axe wants his former enemy to help put his ex-colleague in legal trouble. Says Levien, “He’ll do whatever he has to to scorch the earth under Taylor’s feet.”

Continue reading Billions EP Previews What’s Next for Axe, Rhoades & the Crew in Season 4 – March 15, 2019