#david levien

Why do you think the same five guys make it to the final table of the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest guys in Las Vegas? It's a skill game Jo.

“That’s like a billion dollars in Indiana.” That quip from Bobby Axelrod is one of the memorable lines in the series finale of “Billions,” the Showtime drama series that wrapped its seven-season run Oct. 27 with the crowd-pleasing episode “Admirals Fund.” Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis, delivers that line as he takes a victory lap after demolishing his latest foil, rival hedge fund manager Mike Prince (Corey Stoll). It’s a reference to that fact that Prince, after an elaborate sting pulled off by Axelrod and the core “Billions” ensemble, is left wiped out but for $100 million he invested with Black-owned banks a few years ago. Axe’s comment and Prince’s broad smile suggest that the latter is headed to the Midwest to nurse his wounds and rise anew. The line about Indiana had been on a white board in the “Billions” writers room for more than two seasons, just waiting for the right moment to land a punch, according to co-showrunner and executive producer Beth Schacter. Schacter and series creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien offered insights into the crafting of the finale and the fate of key characters during a Q&A held Oct. 23 at 92Y in New York that included a sneak peek screening of the finale. “We knew that was where we were driving to and it never came off the board — and that never happens,” Schacter told moderator Cynthia Littleton, co-editor in chief of Variety. “And so I think it’s just fun to see that all coalescing” in the final episode.

Season 7 was designed to provide payoffs and fist-pumping moments for the die-hard fans of the series that revolved around the antics of hedge fund managers and the regulators who try to rein in their excesses. That sector of the financial universe has only grown its influence on the macro economy as well as in pop culture since “Billions” bowed in January 2016. “We made a decision early on that we were going to make this season of the show for true ‘Billions’ fans – for the people who watch each episode more than once, who catch our references, who notice every song,” Koppelman said. “We wanted to make the final season that we wanted to see as ‘Billions’ obsessives. Seeing you all get the little lines and jokes and the moments and feeling the emotional resonances is incredibly satisfying.”

Getting the show to the finish line was complicated by the writers strike that extended nearly five months. The script for the final episode was completed before scribes went pencils down on May 2. But none of the three showrunners on stage were able to be on set while the final episodes were lensed. “It was horrible because, you know, we did seven seasons over the course of eight years. We had to take an entire year off during the pandemic. And then to have to stop short and not get to be there for the final lap was really tough,” Levien said. The trio found great comfort in the fact that the finale, penned by Koppelman and Levien, was directed by Neil Burger, who helmed the pilot and one other episode, from Season 2. “Neil knew exactly the right tone of the show, so it worked out great,” Levien said. Koppelman observed, “Sometimes a worthy fight calls for a great sacrifice and ours was a small one compared to the ones that crews and so many other people had to make.” The ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike has added to the challenge of promoting the finale given that stars Lews, Paul Giamatti (Chuck Rhoades), Maggie Siff (Wendy Rhoades), David Costabile (Mike “Wags” Wagner), Asia Kate Dillon (Taylor Mason) and more were unable to talk up their work.

The showrunners noted that they always made an effort to tap into any unexpected skills that each actor brought to the show. Lewis, for one, is a strong tennis player, so of course they worked that into an episode where he plays against Maria Sharapova. Toby Leonard Moore, the Australian actor who played the disgraced (but ultimately redeemed) former federal prosecutor Brian Connerty, once worked as an teppanyaki chef – a role that figured prominently into the finale episode. “When you make a long-running show, you learn a lot of stuff about people and their personal lives, like Dola Rashad is fluent in Italian, so she had to speak Italian at some point,” Levien said. “Toby Leonard Moore made the mistake of telling us that he worked his way through school once as a teppanyaki chef. And we did not forget that — we carried that around for years.” Added Koppelman, “You have never seen a human being care more about the way a shrimp was cut than [Moore] did. He obsessed over the rehearsals with the hibachi.”

The specific storyline for the final season – how Axe was brought back to the U.S. from exile in London and the climactic sting against Prince – came together mostly during Season 6, Levien said. Lewis left the series after the close of Season 5 as his wife, actor Helen McCrory, suffered through a long illness before her death in April 2021. When Lewis let them know he was ready to return for Season 7, that set the plot in motion. “Damian told us before anyone else knew what was going on [with McCrory]. And we knew we were able to say to him, of course and we will bring stuff forward and we will make it all work for season five,” Koppelman said. “But then the three of us and teams of writers sat around and figured out OK, these two seasons — six and seven — what’s the ideal way that it can go? And the fact that we ended up getting to do it in the ideal way that Showtime supported shooting in England, each piece of that was able to work.”

One of the long-running subplots on “Billions” was the will-they-or-won’t-they question of the relationship between Axe and Wendy Rhoades, the brilliant psychologist who was the in-house coach for the alpha traders at Axe Capital (and later Michael Prince Capital). The characters have an incredibly deep relationship – one that confounds their own spouses – but they are not in a sexual relationship. Schacter argued that the two are deeply in love. “It’s not platonic. It’s incredibly romantic. They just don’t kiss,” Schacter said. “The secret sauce of the two of them is that they are truly connected in their souls. It’s just not sexual. They do have a certain type of love affair.” She noted that even some writers on the show mistakenly thought that Axe and Wendy had been in a physical relationship at some point. “Writers pitched it to us all the time. But we felt from the beginning that we had decided it wasn’t going to happen, because then how do you keep the show going,” Koppelman said. “It also felt like they each understood what it was about. They understood that it made them better. They didn’t want to give in to that, it’s part of Wendy’s strength.”

6x01 “Cannonade” (by Brian Koppelman & David Levien): a cannonade = a period of continuous bombardment / heavy gunfire. someone’s under attack. (or maybe it refers to the racehorse of the same name.)

6x02 “Lying Eyes” (by Emily Hornsby): “lyin’ eyes” is a song by the eagles about a young woman who marries a rich older man and cheats on him with a younger man. trouble in paradise for senior and roxanne? or wags and chelz? or ira and taiga, again? or maybe it’s a metaphorical application. in any case, that’s one likely music cue for the season.

6x03 “STD” (by Theo Travers): wikipedia gives many definitions for the initialism “STD,” including but not limited to: sexually transmitted disease (unsurprisingly), internet standards such as STD 68, short term disability, and star trek: discovery.

6x04 “Burn Rate” (by Brian Koppelman & David Levien & Lio Sigerson): in finance, the burn rate is the rate at which a company spends money, particularly the rate at which venture capital is spent before a company starts generating income. finance-specific episode titles tend to be literal, so someone’s burning through cash, perhaps unsustainably.

6x05 “Rock of Eye” (by Eli Attie): “rock of eye” is a tailoring term, meaning an approach to tailoring that’s artistic, instinctual, and guided solely by the eye, rather than a scientific, measurement-based approach. will we get a literal tailor? a figurative tailor? some play on taylor’s name? (they don’t trust instinct, but maybe they’ll have to learn to trust it.)

“I’m the type of actor who won’t take up the most space in the room,” Daniel K. Isaac said.

This was on a weekday morning, at the Public Theater, an hour or so before Isaac would begin rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady,” a play by Lloyd Suh that runs through March 27. Isaac perched at the edge of his chair — arms crossed, legs crossed, chest concave, occupying the bare minimum of leather upholstery.

“It’s a big chair,” he said.

Isaac, 33, a theater actor and an ensemble player on the Showtime drama “Billions,” combines that reticence with intelligence and warmth, qualities that enlarge every character he plays. (On this day, he was dressed as a New Yorker, all in navy and black, but his socks were printed with black-and-white happy faces.) With his sad eyes and resonant voice, he is an actor you remember, no matter how much or little screen time or stage time he receives.

“The Chinese Lady,” is inspired by the life of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who came to America as a teenager in 1834 and was exhibited as a curiosity before disappearing from the popular imagination. Isaac plays Atung, her translator, who made even less of a dent in the historical record. “He exists as a side note,” Isaac said.

Isaac created the role, in 2018, in a production from Barrington Stage and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. Even in a two-hander, he rarely takes center stage, ceding that space to Shannon Tyo’s Afong Moy.

“I am irrelevant,” Atung says in the play’s opening scene.

Isaac relates. In the first decade of his career, he felt ancillary, in part because of the roles available to Asian American men. He still feels that way. But now, in his 30s — and with his debut as a playwright coming later this year — he is trying to be the main character in his own life.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had the big break or the large, hugely visible or recognizable thing,” he said. “My life has been a slow burn, a marathon rather than immediate sprint.” Isaac ought to know: He recently trained for his first marathon, and then posted cheerful selfies — of him in his NipGuards — to Twitter.

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Seven years, some Off Broadway plays and a few episodes of television later, he landed a small part in the “Billions” pilot. He didn’t think much of it. He knew that plenty of pilots didn’t take. And he’d been killed or written off in ones that did. But “Billions” took, and his character, Ben Kim, an analyst who became a portfolio manager, remains alive. Isaac has appeared in every episode. (Still he didn’t quit his restaurant job until midway through Season 2. And technically, the restaurant told him to go.)

The showrunners of “Billions,” Brian Koppelman and David Levien, hadn’t had huge plans for the Ben character. Once they understood Isaac’s intelligence and versatility, they expanded the role. “Daniel is a fearless actor, and that gives us huge freedom,” they wrote in a joint email.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: I have to start with the most obvious question: Was that officially goodbye to Damian and Axe?

BRIAN KOPPELMAN: The goodbyes on Billions and the hellos on Billions are never permanent; nothing is etched in stone. But that said, Damian's time as a regular on Billions has come to an end. The guy delivered for us in such an incredible way. What he did in making Bobby Axelrod an icon is really remarkable. Knowing the conditions in which he performed, traveling back and forth to England for years to be with his family, it's impossible to imagine just how hard and focused that guy worked. We feel really honored and lucky to have had five years of being able to know that Damian Lewis was Bobby Axelrod. But, again, not saying it's goodbye forever.

How did we arrive at this point? Has this long been the plan, or is it a more recent call? Obviously, we know Damian and his family suffered a painful loss earlier this year.

KOPPELMAN: We started talking to Damian about it three years ago. And we're incredibly sensitive to talking about… I mean, he lost his wife, who was a wonderful person and a great artist. But I would say for a variety of reasons we started talking to him three years ago and he expressed the thought that in all likelihood he would want to be spending more time with his family and really be more in England at the end of a certain period of time, and could we start planning Axe's departure from being a regular on the show. It was amazing that he came to us that far in advance and trusted us with what was going on in his life and with what his thinking was so that we could do things like bring Mike Prince in and be really aware in the plotting and planning of season 5. And it also made us know, okay, here's where season 4 needs to go to set up the events of season 5 so that we could do this at the end of it.

That is lucky because most shows don't get that kind of notice when a star decides it's time to take a step back. So, in the end, what made this the place you wanted to leave the character, at least for now?

DAVID LEVIEN: We wanted to make sure that we explored all of the areas where a character like this would go in his life. Whether it's the privilege, the power, the frustrations. So we laid it out and had lots of discussions in the writers' room about the outcomes that could land for a character like this. We also had a keen awareness of our audience, what they wanted, their expectations, and tried to figure out a way that we could both deliver on those things and not play into it in an obvious way, so that there were still surprises, and that everything made sense and had an eventuality to it on a character-level and a real world-level, but also was dramatic and exciting.

KOPPELMAN: Another part of the gift of being able to plan this for years was that we could have our antennas out for what was going on in the way people in the real world were crashing the narrative of this question of outsized wealth. And the way in which you couldn't really have Axe himself try to relanguage what it meant to be a billionaire, but we were able to find a new character in Mike Prince who could take on the language of the next evolution, meaning the next forward-facing evolution of the incredibly successful and powerful financial sector billionaire. And language it in terms of being a force for good. Bobby Axelrod would never even give lip service to this notion that he was amassing this wealth for anybody but himself and his family. Now you have people talking about the utility of money and how they can do good, and we wanted to put this question on the table of, is there such thing as a good billionaire, which we couldn't ask that question with Axe, but we could really ask with Mike Prince.

LEVIEN: Axe sprang of a time when there was a huge amount of privacy around these hedge fund billionaires because they recognize how the culture could look at their wealth. But over the years, there became a new version of it that was much more public and interested in trying to express that they were creating a positive change in the world that went along with their wealth. It was a new narrative, so we were able to jump on that and the show evolved.

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You've long avoided "going there" with Wendy and Axe. So, even if Axe contends that they never really started it, why did you finally decide to steer in that direction? Especially knowing that Axe was about to be coming off the board.

KOPPELMAN: That's something really important there, Derek, which is they never really do start it. That just felt like where the characters needed to go, which is to say everything. Departures are an incredible opportunity to say what's unsaid. And it happened really organically. When we understood where Axe was going and the pressure Axe was going to be under and where Wendy was and what Chuck was going to do, it just seemed clear that there would be this moment that Wendy and Axe could look at each other and say the thing that they've wanted to say. For us, the reaction to it from the audience and the way they've grappled with the question has been perfect.

Wendy tells Taylor that they've basically become Axe on his worst day. You have Taylor really coming to grips with who they've become, and even advise new protégé Rian (Eva Victor) to run from the industry. What did you want to send Taylor through here in these last few episodes?

LEVIEN: Taylor is another one of the characters who's evolving. If you look at a younger character like that on this continuum, who has this exposure to this increasing wealth, it's about what that wealth can potentially do to a person and a character. Those are the forces that are buffeting Taylor and affecting that character that started in one place, perhaps more idealistic and younger in various ways, and now is really in it and grappling with what all that money and power does to an individual. They're very much in it.

We know Taylor and Wendy are almost stuck at what was known as Axe Cap, but you have Dollar Bill and Mafee quitting in favor of a team-up. Why were those the two that you decided to remove from the office? For comedy purposes alone, it seems like a winning move.

KOPPELMAN: A lot of this stuff is instinctive and just what feels right; it's how we've written the whole show. You write this moment of Mike Prince coming in and saying, "I own all this," and suddenly as you're writing, it's just like Dollar Bill's like, "F--- it, I'm out of here," and Mafee is like, "Me too." It's, oh my God, of course.

LEVIEN: Dollar Bill was so bonded to Axe and Axe's way of doing things that it really felt like he couldn't stay. And Mafee had gone through other sorts of rapids between Taylor and Axe and his loyalties and leaving and coming back. Like Brian said, it just felt like the right thing that they should get in that elevator together.

KOPPELMAN: And then there are some great things that came out of that, right? Which is the audience gets to know that even though Dollar Bill and Mafee are not at Axe Capital, or what's going to be Michael Prince Capital, they're together somewhere in an office. And obviously, that creates lots of opportunities potentially for story.

I wouldn't dare ask for a season 6 tease, but Ben Kim (Daniel K. Isaac) saying it feels like we're at the end made me wonder if you've mapped out the endgame for the show and when that would come into play. Or will it be more based on instinct in the moment?