Trivia / Billions

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Paul Giamatti went to Yale, and his father Angelo Bartlett Giamatti was the Yale president from 1978 to 1986.
  • Asia Kate Dillon quietly came out as non-binary in 2015 and removed all gendered pronouns from their biography, and then got cast as the first non-binary character on American television.
  • Dan Soder is also a wrestling fan and a native of Aurora, Colorado.
  • Axe's birthdate on his new Swiss passport is given as February 11, 1971, the same as Damian Lewis's.
• Cast the Expert: Chuck's wise and well-spoken Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach is played by John Danaher, a famously wise and well-spoken Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach.
• The Danza: A playful partial example that comes up in interviews: Dollar Bill Stern is played by Kelly AuCoin.
• Dueling Works: With Succession, another premium cable dramedy set in New York and populated with a cast of rich, scheming, morally bankrupt people (with the final seasons of both shows airing in the same year).
• Dueling-Stars Movie: Well, Dueling-Stars TV Series, but the show is basically an epic feud between Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis/Corey Stohl.
• Fake American:
  • Englishman Damian Lewis, as per usual after Band of Brothers and Homeland.
  • Australian Toby Leonard Moore, once again.
  • Swedish-Canadian Malin Åkerman.
• Fake Russian: John Malkovich as Grigor Andolov, using the same accent he used in Rounders.
• Fan Community Nickname: Billionaires.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Melissa Navia had a guest starring role as an astronaut in Season 2, several years before being cast as Erica Ortegas in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.
  • One Season 2 plotline involved Axe trying to buy an NFL franchise. A few years later, Steve Cohen, the hedge fund manager who Axe is loosely based on, bought a 97% majority stake in the New York Mets (not a football team, but still).
• Playing Against Type: David Costabile, known for playing mild-mannered characters in Flight of the Conchords, The Wire and Breaking Bad, here plays the madcap, scenery-chewing Wags.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Filming for Season 5 was suspended for over a year due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, and the season's second half includes: a Real-Time Timeskip set several months after the initial outbreak; Axe quarantining himself at a summer residence, since Damian Lewis was unable to leave his home in London; characters wearing masks and practicing social distancing; characters communicating through either Zoom (like Chuck's "Jeffersonian dinner") or video phones; some characters (most notably Cat) being Put on a Bus due to availability issues; and at least one character disappearing entirely due to their actor's death (Chuck's therapist Dr. Rutenberg, whose actor, Mark Blum, died of COVID-related complications in March 2020). Several B-plots, such as a humorous scene between Dollar Bill and Spyros, were also left on the cutting room floor due to rewrites.
  • Damian Lewis had asked to be written off of the show three years before the Season 5 finale, as he wanted to focus on his children and tend to his cancer-stricken wife, Helen McCrory. McCrory succumbed to her cancer before the filming of the second half of Season 5, which ends with Axe being exiled to Switzerland.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: TV's first non-binary character, Taylor Mason, is played by the openly non-binary Asia Kate Dillon.
• Troubled Production: Filming for Season 5 was suspended two-thirds of the way in by the COVID-19 Pandemic, which hit the show's primary shooting location of New York City especially hard. The second half didn't begin airing until September 2021, a year-and-a-half later.

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