Character Psychology

Creating Believable Characters Who Generate Conflict Naturally

How Showtime’s Billions perfectly illustrates a Hungarian playwright’s approach to creating conflict in fiction.

Animal conflict seems simpler than ours, but it operates on similar principles. || Photo by Richard Lee on Unsplash

I’ve been rewatching Billions lately. Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis star as ambitious US Attorney Chuck Rhoades and billionaire hedge fund owner Bobby “Axe” Axelrod welded in a Shakespearean-level feud to destroy one another. The show used their antagonism to explore the relationship between capital and the state, the pissing contest between old and new money, and the struggle between institutional power and hyper-wealth.

I never finished the last two seasons; the show was always over-the-top with its depictions of decadence, but the charm of the first two seasons was the central struggle between Giamatti and Lewis. New antagonists for the two main leads never recaptured that magic. Also, one of the juiciest intrigues of the show was their relationship to the third member of the feud: Wendy Rhoades, Chuck’s wife and Axe’s psychiatrist, long-time friend, and work-wife (played by Maggie Siff). Her role changes by season three, to the detriment of the show.

But man, those first two seasons are delicious television.