Corey Stoll is not immune to the charms of enormous wealth. Considering the character he portrays on "Billions," that's probably a useful tool in his arsenal.
Stoll portrays Mike Prince, the dashing, do-gooding New York billionaire who teamed up with the state's attorney general, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), to take down crooked hedge-fund wizard Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis, who departed the show last season).
But in a swerve that neither of the show's main characters saw coming, Prince made a last-minute deal with Bobby that spared the hedge-funder from prosecution and incarceration, at the cost of handing over his business. Now Prince presides over the newly christened Michael Prince Capital, putting him in the crosshairs of both Rhoades and Mike's own potentially mutinous employees.
"Billions"— created by Brian Koppelman, David Levien and New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin — is back for its sixth season. In a phone conversation, Stoll explained how Prince is cut from a different cloth than Axelrod. But the new boss is the same as the old boss in one important respect.
"It gives the same pleasure of watching incredibly smart, driven people betray each other, and then become allies, and then betray each other again," he said.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Q: For a series that was so defined by the relationship between two characters, was it a challenge to step in and take that weight on your shoulders?
A: For me, the real challenge was turning from an antagonist to a protagonist of sorts. In Season 5, I was the engine of pretty much every scene that I was in. I was on the attack, pursuing this goal, and Axe and Rhoades were reacting to me. In just the first few days of shooting Season 6, I had all these scenes where I'm behind the big desk, taking incoming fire. I hadn't really prefigured how different it would be. It uses very different muscles as an actor.
