If it seems like the verbal acrobatics on Showtime’s 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.
The coronavirus pandemic, of course, did a number on watercoolers and the TV shows we discuss around them, and Billions wasn’t immune. Production was halted after seven episodes; the remaining five will shoot and air whenever we figure out how to make live television again. That didn’t stop Koppelman and Levien from having the kind of joyous, back-and-forth conversation they’ve been prosecuting their entire adult lives.
GQ: Have you guys managed to pull together something like a routine?
David Levien: Yeah, well our season was interrupted. So we, pretty early on, started doing Zoom meetings for the writer’s room, which was pretty productive. And we’re marching towards finish everything up in that regard. We had to finish post on a couple of last episodes that were shot, and that’s been working remotely pretty well. Shooting the rest of the season’s going to be a problem, however.
Brian Koppelman: Yeah, we’ll get it done. With the season written and everyone’s ready to come back, we’re all, as Chuck Rhoades might say, champing at the bit to get back to shoot. We just have to do it when it’s safe for the cast and crew.
What was that process of hitting pause like?
DL: We saw it coming, for sure. We were just going, “Is this going to happen? Yes, it’s probably going to happen. When should it happen? Okay, it’s happening.”
BK: Also, what I’m just remembering, D, we had a planned hiatus. We were supposed to take a week off starting the two days after we ended up shutting down. And when we saw that coming, that’s when we started talking to Showtime to say, “Hey, it feels like maybe we should do a shutdown a hair earlier.” And they were great. So we were able to shut down that Thursday night, or something like that, just before we were going to go into our hiatus anyway.
You know, Sam, I think we follow each other on Twitter, and I’ve been aware and pretty focused on [coronavirus] from January 14th.
Yeah, I was going to say—I remember you trying to pull together a bunch of experts, really going deep on the research, and maybe driving yourself a little crazy.
BK: It seemed like maybe I was being overly crazy or overly concerned, but then as I started reading more stuff… One of the things that Dave and I do is we research so heavily, and we learn how to figure out who the true experts are. So I was using a lot of those skills to figure this stuff out, and it started to seem like it might become a problem if we didn’t do certain things at the federal level that we didn’t do.