Damian Lewis exits Billions after five seasons

SPOILER ALERT. A main character has exited American drama Billions, months after a personal tragedy.

SPOILER ALERT: References plot points from Billions season five finale, “No Direction Home”

There was a major character exit on American drama Billions.

Billions confirmed Damian Lewis and his character, the charismatic and unscrupulous hedge fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, will not be returning to the series for its sixth season.

The just-released season five finale closed with Axe on the run in Switzerland after narrowly escaping an enclosing legal quagmire.

Lewis told The New York Times, “There’s an opportunity maybe for me to return, but for now, broadly speaking, Axe has been vanquished.”

The British actor added to NYT that he wants to stay in London for “obvious reasons”, referring to the death of his wife, Helen McCrory, earlier this year.

Damian Lewis has exited Billions. Picture: Showtime

Billions’ fifth season was released in two halves after the production was stalled by covid after the initial seven episodes, which were released last year. The final five episodes premiered in September.

Lewis returned to filming the fifth season this year not long after McCrory’s death but did most of it in London, where he is based. On screen, his character only appeared via video calls, with the explanation that Axe had to isolate after being exposed to covid, except in the finale, which Lewis filmed in New York City.

However, even with his personal tragedy, Lewis said he had always signed up for only five seasons of the series, and that Billions is the longest time he had spent playing one character.

Lewis’s position in the series – and certainly his character’s in the story – will be taken over by Corey Stoll, who joined the cast at the start of the fifth season as Mike Prince, a self-made billionaire who claims to have a more philanthropic and ethical approach to investments.

The series released a season six teaser which pits Stoll’s Prince against Paul Giamatti’s Chuck Rhoades, a new dynamic after the show spent most of its first five seasons as a brutal fight for power and dominance between Axe and Chuck.

Lewis is the third exit of a major original character from the series, following Malin Ackerman and Toby Leonard Moore.

Billions spent most of its first five seasons as a cat-and-mouse game between Chuck and Axe. Picture: Showtime

Set in the high-stakes environment of Manhattan finance, Billions is a series that explores a world where the bets are big, the consequences are only for losers and whole companies and towns are just chess pieces in a game.

While the series can be deliciously entertaining, watching morally corrupt characters triumph over one another, social movements of the past few years have highlighted the growing chasm between the one per cent and everyone else.

With the Prince character, someone who supposedly follows a different book when it comes to making obscene money, Billions co-creator Brian Koppleman told Variety, “The show has been asking the question as we go forward – is there such a thing as a beneficent billionaire, or are they by their very nature agents of harm?

“Are you automatically a monster or can you use your money in ways that add to the utility of the world?”

Billions season six is slated to premiere in January. The series streams in Australia on Stan.

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