Bobby’s back! After a Season 6 without Damian Lewis, the Showtime hit Billions will be bringing back hedge fund manager Bobby “Axe” Axelrod for the show’s upcoming 7th season, the actor confirmed last night. And his return will have big implications for the Billions universe.
The former Homeland star appeared on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert last night, where he confirmed the news after photos of him on the Billions set had rumors about his character’s fate flying.
“Axe is back,” he affirmed to host Colbert. “And it’s exciting. He’s not been around for a couple seasons but he’s back.”
Lewis left the show after Season 5 to deal with a personal tragedy: his wife, famed actress Helen McCrory, passed away after a battle with breast cancer in 2021, and Lewis wanted to spend more time at home in the UK to be with their two children. On the show, his character moved to Switzerland at the end of the 5th season to avoid prosecution at the hands of New York Attorney General Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti). But in Season 7, he’s back and ready for battle.
While Lewis proclaimed he couldn’t offer any spoilers about the events of Season 7 to Colbert, the following log line has been released for the upcoming season: “In Season seven, alliances are turned on their heads. Old wounds are weaponized. Loyalties are tested. Betrayal takes on epic proportions. Enemies become wary friends. And Bobby Axelrod returns, as the stakes grow from Wall Street to the world.”
Lewis will appear in six of Season 7’s 12 episodes and star alongside Giamatti, Corey Stoll and Maggie Siff. When the star left left the show at the end of Season 5, creator Brian Koppelman told Entertainment Weekly that his exit wasn’t “etched in stone” but it had been in talks for years, allowing the show-runners to carefully craft Michael Prince’s takeover.
“We started talking to him three years ago,” Koppelman said in October 2021, “and he expressed the thought that in all likelihood he would want to be spending more time with his family and really be more in England at the end of a certain period of time and could we start planning Axe’s departure from being a regular on the show. It was amazing that he came to us that far in advance . . . we could do things like bring Mike Prince in and be really aware in the plotting and planning of Season 5.”
“Bobby Axelrod would never even give lip service to this notion that he was amassing this wealth for anybody but himself and his family,” Koppelman continued, which made the character’s brief exit almost a blessing, given the new angles they could explore with Prince. “We wanted to put this question on the table of, is there such thing as a good billionaire, which we couldn’t ask that question with Axe, but we could really ask with Mike Prince.
Season 7 of Billions does not yet have a premiere date, but it’s expected to come out in 2023.
