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Entertainment February 28, 2017
From the very first scene of “Billions” when she put out a cigarette on her husband’s chest and then urinated on him, we knew Wendy Rhoades was a character to be reckoned with.
Now with season two of the drama about financial power battles underway on Showtime, Maggie Siff’s character – a psychiatrist and occasional dominatrix – continues to be the fiercest badass on TV.
In the first season, Wendy was torn between two powerful men as the wife to crusading U.S Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and top aide to billionaire hedge fund boss Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis). When her husband started investigating her boss, she refused to sacrifice her lucrative career for the sake of his fight for justice.
But now in season two, Wendy has split from her husband and left her boss’s firm – and both men find they want her back.
“She’s caught in the middle,” says Maggie. “Wendy does have a moral compass but she’s seduced by the power of wealth. The conflict of interest is part of the drama.
“Maggie knows what a lot of these men need, she appreciates the hardball world they are all in and she can definitely swim with the sharks. She also has a lot of power over these people who have a lot of power.”
Perfectly able to stand on her own two feet, she tells Chuck and Bobby in one memorable episode, “I am not going to be the shuttlecock that you two men smack back and forth.”
Seeing her stand up to the two men and also how the weekly drama deals with issues of sex, power, money and law has quickly made it essential viewing. So have the complex characters.
Wendy has engaged in BDSM role play with Chuck, who is her “slave,” and she has a very different but equally strong relationship with Bobby, having spent more than 15 years helping him build his successful firm.
Also keeping viewers coming back for more are Maggie’s scenes with another of the strong women on the show, Malin Akerman, who plays her boss’s loyal and street-smart wife, Lara Axelrod.
“I feel like I am the other woman, but I’m not the other woman,” Siff said at the Television Critics Association press conference for “Billions.”
Describing the relationship between the two main female characters, she added, “It’s got all these weird, uncomfortable layers. We try to make the scenes real and not catty. And also, it’s nice to come to work and work with a lady, which doesn’t happen much.”
Siff, who has a two-year-old daughter with her husband Paul Ratliff, previously spent six seasons on FX drama “Sons of Anarchy” as Dr. Tara Knowles, the physician wife of a motorcycle-gang leader, another strong woman who could hold her own in a male dominated world. Or at least she could until, in one of that show’s most memorable scenes, she was stabbed to death in her kitchen with a barbecue fork by her mother-in-law.
Maggie was also on AMC’s “Mad Men” as early Don Draper love interest Rachel Menken, the heiress boss of a department store who later died of luekemia. Before making her mark in TV drama, she was an acclaimed New York stage actress.
But now the 42-year-old actress has found the role of a lifetime on “Billions” and more than holds her own in an impressive cast. “Billions” can be seen each Sunday night on Showtime.
