There’s a scene in the pilot episode of the new Showtime drama Billions in which Bobby and Lara Axelrod and their sons sit down to dinner: The chef brings the food, Dad quizzes the boys on American history and the dog starts peeing on the furniture. Voices aren’t raised. Smiles are cracked. It’s a wholesome family meal in the not-modest home of a Manhattan billionaire.
Billions creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien assumed that if they spent several years researching the kings of industry and government who wield incomprehensible amounts of power in the United States, they’d find some stories that aren’t seen often on screen. Like the fact that rich men can make complex, nurturing husbands.
“We’ve discovered that there are a lot of real marriages out there in the landscape of the billionaire,” Levien says. “And that’s what we wanted to portray—sort of a real, complicated, mature marriage. So when it came time to cast [Lara], it was a very specific and special person we were looking for to play the part.”
They went through dozens of actresses before they were pitched Malin Akerman. They knew her work from plenty of big-budget comedies—27 Dresses and The Heartbreak Kid, among them—but they didn’t know if she had the range to play the character they were looking for: A woman who, like her husband, came from a working-class background but found herself as an adult with a personal chef and all the trimmings.
“We needed someone you could believe was as smart as these characters and had the capacity to be very steely, but could also showcase a lot of warmth and love,” Koppelman says. “And as soon as we started talking to Malin, it was clear that she fit the bill.”
Actually, they had no idea. When they cast Akerman as Lara, they weren’t aware of how much of Akerman’s backstory paralleled Lara’s.
Akerman wasn’t raised in a high-rise with a chef or a dad who quizzed her at dinner time. She was born in Sweden and was raised in Canada, primarily by her mom, an aerobics instructor and waitress who did some modeling. After high school, Akerman studied child psychology in college but took a break to give acting a try.
When she started enjoying some success, she found herself in a similar situation as Lara: A working-class girl who ended up in a situation—her face on big screens across America—that comes with, as Levien calls it, “a certain kind of treatment.”
“There was a lot of learning to be had,” Akerman says of the Hollywood game. “And I think that Lara probably went through the same thing in high society, how people act. It’s a whole different world, a different community.”
Not that success came quickly to Akerman. When she moved to Los Angeles, she modeled and acted for a while before fronting an alt-rock band called The Petalstones. Inevitably, the band met its end. Broke and couch-surfing, Akerman decided to give acting one more try.
“I’ll give it two months,” she remembers thinking in 2005. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m headed back to Toronto to go back to school.”
That’s when she landed a part in HBO’s The Comeback, starring Lisa Kudrow.
“That was my sign,” she says. “And I just never went back.”
In the years since, she’s worked mostly in comedy, acting in films such as Couples Retreat and Wanderlust, and she starred in ABC’s Trophy Wife. Then, in 2014, she decided to make a pivot. She wanted to challenge herself to step outside of comedy and work on a TV show where she could play a character with a longer arc than on film.
“When I read the [Billions] script and saw these strong female characters, it just hit me in the right spot,” she says. “And I went ‘Yes. This is who I want to be. This is what I want to do right now, to be this strong woman who is very driven and powerful in her own world and is not afraid.’”
Lara Axelrod is certainly not timid. She’s the wife of a hedge fund billionaire (Damian Lewis) who has provoked the interest of the U.S. Attorney (Paul Giamatti). And when crossed, Lara doesn’t pull any punches.
“These overtly comedic actors, sometimes when they come to dramatic roles, bring something that can feel a little bit sentimental at times,” says Lewis. “Malin doesn’t bring any of that. She’s a ball breaker.”
Koppelman won’t give up any spoilers, but he does say that the “hint of who she is and her capacities that exist in the pilot definitely come forward in the rest of the show.”
Lara’s hard-edged potential isn’t something Akerman feels like she embodies herself, but she sees reason to appreciate it in her character. “I like that sort of bluntness to her that doesn’t beat around the bush,” she says. “But she’s a lovely human being otherwise—if you adhere to her set of standards. But you mess with the family and you’re dead.”