Standing tall as an alpha woman
Tough men meet their match in Maggie Siff ’s screen presence
NEW YORK— Last season, Billions performed a delicate balancing act.
Chuck Rhoades, the powerful and perverse U.S. attorney (played by Paul Giamatti), was locked in a legal cage match with hedge-fund titan Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis). But through it all, Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff ) kept a foot planted in both worlds: as the wife of Chuck and top aide to Axe.
Now, in this Showtime drama’s sophomore season, the equilibrium is shattered. Wendy has separated from her husband and bolted from Axe’s firm, leaving those combatants to clash even more ferociously.
The only sure thing about the narrative shakeup: Wendy Rhoades can take care of herself and, when necessary, cut Chuck and Axe down to size.
On a show that pits two alpha males against each other, Wendy stands tall as a reigning alpha woman.
“This season you see her trying to walk a line with each of them while she maintains her dignity and distance,” says Siff, who brings Wendy vibrantly to life. “To find her own moral centre, she had to shed the two of them.”
On the premiere (Sunday at 10 p.m. on TMN), you’ll see Wendy spurn Bobby Axelrod’s overtures to return as the inhouse psychotherapist and performance coach.
And you’ll see her stand up to Chuck when he rages, “I always knew I’d end up smeared by Axelrod’s poison,” for which he blames his wife as having served as the carrier: “Proximity is enough.”
“I no longer have proximity to it,” she sneers, “and you no longer have proxim- ity to me.”
Wendy is an unusual character for series TV and a distinctly different character than Siff has played in the past. And yet all her women share a common bond: they’re strong, smart and commanding even in a crowd dominated by men.
For six seasons on FX’s Sons of Anarchy, Siff played Tara Knowles, the physician wife of a motorcycle-gang leader who could hold her own, and then some, in that wild-and-woolly world.
Siff came to Sons from her brief but emblematic stint early in Mad Men, where she played Rachel Menken, the bold heiress and boss of a New York department store who became romantically involved with ad man Don Draper.
Unlike so many of his conquests, Rachel soon recognized that their relationship was not one for the ages. She cut her ties with Don, the caddish married man and dad, when he proposed they leave it all behind and run away together.
A woman who began her career in experimental theatre in Philadelphia and then off-Broadway, the Bronx, New York native, now 42, admits to surprise at her repeated success in TV drama.
She finds herself now in an acclaimed drama alongside two leading men she calls “phenomenal actors and phenomenal human beings.
“Damian is so subtle but so precise as an actor,” she says, “while Paul charges out of the gate with so much life. Their energies are very different. It’s fun to float between them as scene partners.”
And for Billions viewers, there’s more fun ahead watching Siff power between them as the forceful link in this tangled tale.