and more praise and details about Bobby Axelrod and brilliant actor behind the character:)
In Billions — which hopes to comfort your loss of The Affair Sunday nights on Showtime — Damian Lewis stars as Bobby Axelrod, a hedge-fund billionaire who favors tight T-shirts as formal wear and likes Metallica cranked up to 11. His nemesis in life is Paul Giamatti’s United States Attorney Chuck Rhodes, who loathes Axelrod’s contempt for the rules and slippery business practices. In the first hour, these two are set up on a collision course to go head-to-head, with mutually assured destruction always a possibility.
Billions, created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, is set up to be a high-quality, insider look at insider trading, with the promise that we’ll see a greedy egomaniac brought low. But to its credit, the show complicates things nicely. For every macho-creep thing done by Axe — that’s what everyone who really knows Axelrod calls him — he’s also shown to be a frequently generous guy, loyal to old friends and an active participant in a solid marriage to Malin Akerman’s Lara. When you combine this with Lewis’s excellent performance, at once steely, warm, and tart, Axe becomes an engaging figure.
