‘Billions’ Maggie Siff on Love and S&M scenes with Paul Giamatti
“You have say things like ‘motherflopping’ and ‘crud,’” she tells The Daily Beast, laughing.Those are words that would never come out of her character’s mouth. On Billions, which premiered last month, Siff plays Wendy Rhoades, wife of U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) and in-house therapist for hedge fund titan Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis). A woman caught between two male-dominated worlds, Wendy is adept at manipulating the leaders of these two warring factions. And she makes her dominance known from the start: In the opening scene of the pilot she puts out a cigarette on her husband’s chest and then urinates on him.After spending the early part of her career in theater, it was the rise of the cable television drama that helped propel Siff into the public eye. Her breakthrough role was as Jewish department store scion and early Don Draper love interest Rachel Menken on the first season of Mad Men. From there she spent six seasons as Dr. Tara Knowles on FX’s Sons of Anarchy—ending with a particularly violent incident involving a large carving fork—before landing one of the main roles on Billions.
