Maggie Siff We chat to the Billions star in Monte Carlo as the series returns
Billions may be yet another show about money, power and bad people, but you’re unlikely to see one done with such style, sass and sex. Donal O’Donoghue meets the woman behind the bullwhip, Maggie Siff
Billions, a TV drama about money, power and politics, is bonkers. It can also be rather brilliant. Inspired loosely by a true-life tale, this US drama, now kicking o its fourth season, charts the cat-and-mouse wrangling between now-former attorney Charles ‘Chuck’ Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and the man he is hell-bent on imprisoning, hedge fund tycoon, Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod (Damian Lewis). It is a yarn writ large, from the corrupt canyons of Wall St to barracking boardrooms and bedroom shenanigans. Of course it’s tosh but a thoroughbred cast keeps the wheels oiled, not least Maggie Si as Wendy Rhoades, wife and dominatrix to Chuck, as well as in-house performance coach and corporate strategist for Axe. Yep, bonkers!
Last year Si gave us her take on Billions and Wendy Rhoades, modelled partly on celebrity life coach Tony Robbins, when she stopped by the Monte Carlo TV Festival. Rhoades is the latest in a line of ercely independent women that the New Yorker has played on screen, including Rachel Menken, the heiress who walked away from Don Draper in Mad Men and Tara Knowles, the wife of a motorcycle gang leader in Sons of Anarchy. “When I started working on Billions I had just had a baby girl,” says Si . “(Lucy) is nearly ve now and my life is nearly split down the middle between playing this superwoman (Wendy) and being at home on the oor with my baby in sweatpants. Being a mom is what I do but it is also great to step out and be this other person.”
Yet Si paused when she rst opened the script back in 2015, blindsided by Rhoades’ very rst appearance, in spiked heels and bondage gear as she ‘tortures’ her husband by stubbing out a cigarette on his naked esh and then dousing the burn in a somewhat unconventional manner. But Si saw the potential in the character, a driven woman giving as good as she gets (and then some) in a traditionally male bastion. “You always have to dig within yourself to nd the part of you that will help you execute the character,” she says. “And maybe in another world I could have been a psychiatrist. ere is certainly a link with being an actor in that you’re also interested in human beings, watching people and observing how they act and interact.”
As for the S&M scenes, Si says they are just a detail in the big picture and anyway she’s more anxious about the technicalities of lming when thigh-high in leather and brandishing a bull-whip. “(Paul) is usually tied up and I have to make sure that I don’t hurt him,” she says. “We also have a consultant on set, a dominatrix who helps us with those scenes. e thing is they don’t happen a lot on the show but they
make a big statement and people feel like they are a bigger part of the show than they actually are. But they do take a lot of time and focus because it is technically difficult to execute such compromising positions that are also intimate moments in a marriage. So usually I’m just tired at the end of those days.”
Sparky and smart, Siff carefully negotiates the plot to date, not wishing to spill any spoilers from the end of season three. “There is a continuation of the love triangle,” she says, with a wink, of the Chuck-Axe-Wendy triptych. When I ask, ‘You’re winking – is that significant?’ she laughs. “Yes that love triangle has been difficult to sustain but last season began with Wendy recommitted to her marriage and also recommitted to Axe Capital. She is being transparent with both of the men about what she is doing and why she is doing it. Chuck and Wendy have reached a peace about her job but last season the triangle breaks down, so a lot of stuff gets reconfigured.” Season four certainly sees a major shifting of alliances, with Rhoades and Axelrod working together to bring down old enemies. “All I want is vengeance and it will be had,” says Chuck Rhoades in the season opener and in his crosshairs is the Attorney General who precipitated his fall from power last season. On the other side of the divide, Axe is intent on chopping down Taylor Mason, now managing a rival firm, and there’s also a Russian oligarch (an unleashed John Malkovich ladling out the ham) who may be getting more than his pound of flesh from his one-time confederate. “All I can tell you about season four is that it is set up for something completely different,” says Siff with another wink. “We saw that the end of the last season.”
Siff, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Paul Ratliff and their daughter, had a circuitous path to acting. In her teens, she chose the Bronx High School of Science over a performing arts college, subsequently majored in English at Bryn Mawr before finally studying drama at the prestigious Tisch School of Arts. Before graduation, she briefly worked as a temp at a Wall Street hedge fund. “I mentioned that once in an interview and now it’s everywhere,” she says and laughs. “It’s kind of embarrassing because it was a very brief window. I was a research assistant but I don’t think I was a very good employee. I did what I could but I really didn’t understand that world.”
Yet it gave her some inkling of Billions, a place of money and machismo, just as living with Wendy Rhoades gave her an insight into another world and mindset. “She has a lot of skills and knowledge about what makes people tick and how to get what she wants herself.” Has she learned any of those tricks herself? “I wish,” she says. “I think that Wendy is helpful to me in terms of what it means to assume confidence. I sometimes ask myself things like ‘How would Wendy walk into this room?’ and there are moments when you are doing things like press junkets or stupid things like the red carpet where Wendy has helped me. But I wouldn’t say that she has made me a more manipulative person.”
Of her time in Sons of Anarchy, Siff has spoken of that slice of Middle America, or ‘Trumpland’ as some have dubbed it, as largely alien to her liberal, middleclass New York upbringing. “Ah yeah,” she says. “I have lived between coasts all my adult life and there is a really big swathe of our country, especially if you’re in the entertainment business and went to a liberal arts college, as I did, that you don’t get a lot of exposure to. Plus I don’t watch Fox News. When I was working on Sons of Anarchy, I felt like I got to know a lot more about that part of our country and our culture, and that sometimes things are not so black and white.”
Aside from her dramatic entrance to Billions, Siff’s other most visceral on-screen moment was her bloody exit from Sons of Anarchy, where she came to a spectacularly sticky end. “Did you say sticky?” she asks. “I just wanted to make sure I heard you correctly” ( I’m still wondering what she might have heard). She laughs again. “You know I’ve told them that they can’t kill me off in Billions. It would not be an appropriate end for Wendy. But luckily we are in a show where such things are unlikely to happen.”
Not so sure about that Maggie.
We have a consultant on set, a dominatrix who helps with those scenes