Tag: David Levien

Categories Billions Print Media

Janeane Garofalo to Recur in Billions Season 5

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Winslow: Hip Owner of Legal Cannabis Corp

by Denise Petski | Deadline | May 5, 2021

Emmy nominee Janeane Garofalo (The Larry Sanders Show) is joining the fifth season of Showtime’s hit drama series Billions in a recurring role. The first seven episodes of Season 5 aired from May to June 2020 and the series will return to complete its fifth season later this year.

In season five, Damian Lewis’ Bobby Axelrod and Paul Giamatti’s Chuck Rhoades see their vicious rivalry reignited, while new enemies rise and take aim. Chuck feuds with a formidable district attorney, played by Roma Maffia. Taylor Mason, played by Asia Kate Dillon, is forced back to Axe Capital, where Taylor must fight to protect their employees and their assets. Wendy Rhoades, played by Maggie Siff, reevaluates her loyalties and forges surprising new alliances that put her at odds with both Chuck and Axe.

Garofalo will play Winslow, the hip owner of a legal cannabis corp.

Read the rest of the original article at Deadline

Categories Billions Video

VIDEO: Ranking Your Favorite Billions Character – March 5, 2021

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Andy Staples Show Ranks Billions Characters

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 5, 2021

Andy and The Athletic’s Max Olson rank their favorite characters from the hit Showtime series, Billions. Damian Lewis gets some props not just about Billions, but about his previous NBC show Life. See where Axe ranks here:

 

Categories Announcement Billions In Development/ Pre-Production

First Photo of Damian With Billions S5 Crew – March 2, 2021

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Axe Cappers

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | March 2, 2021

First glimpse of Damian and Asia Kate Dillon (who plays Taylor Mason) hanging out together as they prepare filming the remaining five episodes of Billions season 5.

Categories Announcement Billions In Development/ Pre-Production

Billions Back Filming in March – Feb 21, 2021

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Filming Rest of Season 5 and Season 6

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | February 21, 2021

It’s official. Billions will be back to filming next month, March 2021. We have some insider information straight from Dollar Bill! Kelly AuCoin, who plays Dollar Bill Stearn confirmed this in the below tweet. Other social media postings for casting notices indicate shooting dates of March-November for the remaining episodes of season 5 and also season 6.

Then on 2/24/21 Daniel K. Isaac, who plays Ben Kim on the show, tweeted this:

Continue reading Billions Back Filming in March – Feb 21, 2021

Categories Billions Print Media

Show Me the Money – Jan 9, 2021

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TV Series Industry Cashes In On Finance Drama Boom

by Michael Idato | The Sydney Morning Herald | January 9, 2021

In an economic era increasingly defined by tax avoidance, inequality and constant disruption, it seems unlikely that financial web-spinners in expensive suits would become the poster children of TV’s most popular dramas.

And yet the success of shows including Billions, about the exploits of scheming billionaire Bobby Axelrod, Black Monday, which chronicled the preamble to the 1998 stock market collapse, and Devils, about key players in an investment bank tied to the 2008 financial crisis, speaks for itself.

Continue reading Show Me the Money – Jan 9, 2021

Categories Billions Music Poll Print Media

The 10 Best TV Needle Drops of 2020 – Dec 29, 2020

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2020 Best TV Songs/Soundtrack Moments

by Sean T. Collins | Vulture | December 29, 2020

“Vision” is right there in the name of the damn thing, but as a medium, television is as much dependent on sound as it is on sight. This year, from comedies to dramas, from terrestrial networks to streaming services, a good soundtrack was often as big a part of a show’s critical conversation, and as crucial a component in separating great TV from the rest of the pack, as any other element. As part of our annual holiday tradition, we’re once again counting down the year’s top music cues, for those glorious moments when sound and vision collide. Crank ’em up!

Continue reading The 10 Best TV Needle Drops of 2020 – Dec 29, 2020

Categories Billions Print Media Video

VIDEO: Billions Showrunners Break Down the Season 5 Premiere and What’s to Come – May 4, 2020

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Variety After Show

by Staff and Cynthia Littleton | Variety | May 3, 2020

Can the group of hardcore characters who fuel the “Billions” universe overcome their baser instincts to find success and happiness? These are the broad themes of the fifth season of “Billions,” Showtime’s twisty-turny drama series set against the backdrop of New York’s investment and high-finance community.

Brian Koppelman and David Levien, series co-creators and showrunners, join the Variety After Show, presented by National Geographic, to break down the season premiere and offer some insights about the rest of the season ahead. The opener, “The New Decas,” was penned by Koppelman and Levien and directed by Matthew McLoota.

Continue reading VIDEO: Billions Showrunners Break Down the Season 5 Premiere and What’s to Come – May 4, 2020

Categories Billions Music Print Media

Billions & Bangers: Showtime’s High Finance Drama is a Stealth Love Letter to Music – May 3, 2020

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Becoming Fluent in the Musical Language of Billions

by Al Shipley | Complex | May 3, 2020

At a time when TV prestige dramas often have 90-second opening credits with an epic theme song and lavish visuals, Billions on Showtime has an unusually short and simple title sequence: an ominous aerial view of Manhattan, soundtracked by a queasy low electronic pulse, in and out in about 15 seconds. The show’s score and theme music is by Eskmo, an electronic producer associated with labels like Ninja Tune and Warp Records, who puts moody, unobtrusive beds of sound under the dialogue-heavy show about powerful hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod, his company Axe Capital, and the public officials trying to catch them breaking the law. But Billions, which returns with the Season 5 premiere on May 3, has gotten increasingly flashy with its nods to music since the Season 2 scene that featured a lengthy discussion of Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett’s creative chemistry in Wilco.

Increasingly, Billions has been rife with moments where music didn’t just provide an emotional backdrop but memorable dialogue. “Dollar” Bill Stern (Kelly AuCoin) belted out the opening verse of Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” when Axe Capital hatched a plan involving “the chicken man” who sets prices in the poultry industry. Politician Chuck Rhodes (Paul Giamatti) air drummed to Al Green and offered a critical breakdown of 1977’s The Belle Album. And when Attorney General Waylon Jeffcoat (Clancy Brown) tried to intimidate Rhodes’s corrupt father into a confession, he said that he has a witness “singin’ like Hank Williams the elder, tellin’ us all about your cheatin’ heart.”

Continue reading Billions & Bangers: Showtime’s High Finance Drama is a Stealth Love Letter to Music – May 3, 2020

Categories Billions Print Media Review

Billions Is Back, and It’s More Billions Than Ever – May 3, 2020

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Season 5 Interview with Co-Creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien

by Sam Schube | GQ | May 3, 2020

If it seems like the verbal acrobatics on Billions could only have come from a kind of writerly mind-meld, that’s because they do. Co-creators and showrunners David Levien and Brian Koppelman met at 15, and have spent the intervening years precision-honing their blend of gee-whiz plotting (Ocean’s 13) and subculture deep-diving (Rounders). Billions, their turbocharged take on the Wall Street machers running the world and the law-and-order types trying to reel them in, represents the apotheosis of both. (The journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin is also credited as a creator.)

On the one side, Damian Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod, a made-it-from-nothing master of the universe with a taste for Metallica and cashmere hoodies. On the other: Paul Giamatti’s New York AG Chuck Rhoades, the rule-bending lawman with a taste—as made public last season—for BDSM. Orbiting them is a scenery-chewing bunch of character actors, joined this year by Julianna Margulies (a professor with a bestseller about the female orgasm), Frank Grillo (a he-man painter), and Corey Stoll (Mike Prince, a billionaire investor whose conscious capitalism rankles Axe). In other words: it’s all still extremely Billions.

Continue reading Billions Is Back, and It’s More Billions Than Ever – May 3, 2020

Categories Behind the Scenes Billions Music Podcast

Introducing ‘Behind the Billions’ – May 2, 2020

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Behind the Scenes Podcast on Spotify

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | May 2, 2020

Introducing ‘Behind the Billions!’ Co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien give a behind-the-scenes look into Billions season five. After each episode’s airing on Showtime, the podcast will unpack the writing of the script, exclusive stories from production, the ideas behind the music cues, and much more on the Spotify app. The 12-episode podcast season will also include interviews with cast and crew members as well as bonus podcast episodes devoted to inside stories from Billions hosts: Brian Koppelman and David Levien. Spotify link here.

Categories Billions Print Media

Billions Creators on Releasing Season 5 of the New York Drama in Uncertain Times – May 1, 2020

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An Insider-y Take On A Not So Insider-y Show

by Stacey Wilson Hunt | Fortune Magazine | May 1, 2020

There’s little that Brian Koppelman and David Levien haven’t tackled in their artistic careers. From early forays in the music business (Koppelman), to novel-writing (Levien), to the ups and downs of screenwriting-in-tandem—including 1998’s Rounders and 2007’s Ocean’s Thirteen—to making one of Showtime’s most-watched drama, Billions, the New York natives have curated an almost Zen-like approach to their work: create cool, smart stuff and have a blast doing it.

But Koppelman and Levien faced the beginning of what is likely to be their most daunting challenge as storytellers when production on season five of Billons, which films on location all around New York City, was halted mid-March because of the global coronavirus pandemic. As a result, the series— which tells the ongoing saga of former U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and hedge fund king Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis)—will air a truncated installment of episodes starting Sunday, May 3, as Billions’ tight-knit cast, crew, and its team of creators (which includes author Andrew Ross Sorkin) face what so many of us are confronting: nearly total uncertainty as to how and when all of this chaos will end.

To find out what fans can expect from season five’s amended rollout, Fortune spoke by phone to Koppelman and Levien on April 13 and asked whether they plan to address the global pandemic in future episodes; how they’re using Twitter to ease feelings of isolation (and raise money for coronavirus relief); and how their partnership, now curated remotely via Zoom, has offered calm at a time when they need it most.

Continue reading Billions Creators on Releasing Season 5 of the New York Drama in Uncertain Times – May 1, 2020

Categories Billions Print Media

Corey Stoll is Ready To Go To War with Axe – May 1, 2020

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Damian Is So Game

by Derek Lawrence | Entertainment Weekly | May 1, 2020

Season 5 of Billions is set to find rivals-turned-allies Chuck (Paul Giamatti) and Axe (Damian Lewis) returning to rival status, but Axe is going to be on the attack from all sides as Corey Stoll joins the hit Showtime series in a formidable new role.

Creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien say they’ve long tried to cast the “immensely talented” House of Cards alum, especially after he filled in at a table read for one of their films and “killed it,” so much so that Levien wishes they would have filmed it. “Finally a break in his schedule coincided with our season,” Levien tells EW, “and we were able to write a character for him that is super intelligent, aggressive, charismatic, all of the things that he’s really built to play.”

And that character is Michael Prince, a billionaire who looks at this world through the perspective of an impact investor. “He’s aware of the consequences of modern life, meaning he’s aware of environmental impact, he’s aware of the sort of corrosive impact of the world of high finance,” shares Koppelman. “But, at the same time, he’s all the way in that world, too. And he and Bobby Axelrod do not see the world the same way, but they’re both titanic figures in the world of finance, and so sparks fly when the two of them are in the same room.”

Continue reading Corey Stoll is Ready To Go To War with Axe – May 1, 2020