Playing your character at the top of his game must be fun. How do you like playing Billy on the ropes? “Actually, playing the latter is more comfortable for me. For my own psyche, this version is easier for me to play.”
That answer is surprising. Please explain. “Whatever is in me, that kind of stuff takes less work for me, it sits a little more comfortably and easier to access, to be honest. In saying that, the king-of-the-world stuff is kind of a hard place for me to personally get to, so I usually have to tap into other things. It’s funny, Billy so full of himself feels icky sometimes but you have to be willing to go there because it allows the bad times to work, you know, the kick in the teeth of it all. It helps to tell both paradigms of this guy’s life at the moment, which is the entertaining side of it.”
Well, you definitely make both sides look very realistic. “Thanks, I hope I’m making it work. Sometimes it’s hard for us to tell if something is working or not. So much of our stories are told by people in other scenes. When I watch the show, I enjoy checking in because it helps me to understand the bigger picture when I see it all come together. And sometimes when you don’t like your character, that’s part of the entertainment side of things. It’s like when I watch SUCCESSION and I’m going, ‘Oh, my God! I don’t like any of these people!’ but I cannot stop watching.”
What was it like for Billy to have Jill come home and berate him for screwing up? “Selfishly, it’s always amazing when Jess [Walton, Jill] comes to town. Billy loves his mother but she rarely ever brings good news. It’s usually never a good thing when Billy runs into his mom. They’ll have a head-on collision, then they’ll work it out and find some kind of balance to it all. That’s their relationship, but there’s no denying that the reason she’s come this time is because things are a little out of his control right now because of what went down with Victor and Adam. Billy did say at one point that he holds himself responsible for letting down Jill, Lily, the company and the staff, so it was very humbling for him. But does he think it’s all his fault? No, so he bites his tongue a little bit there, but his and Jill’s relationship is always a place for Billy to express a side of him that nobody else really knows and only she understands. You can have an argument about who’s right or wrong about his opinion but he’s really not understood by a lot of people. And as much as Jill disagrees with Billy, she can’t stop loving the guy.”
How does this ChancComm crisis impact his relationship with Lily? Especially since she was the one who summoned Jill behind Billy’s back. “He understands why Lily called Jill. He also knows that Lily is on his side, which is a beautiful thing, so they’re really learning how to support each other because there’s a lot of honesty there. We sometimes forget Lily’s story. She has been through a lot in the last handful of years with going to jail, her divorce and the things that Cane had done, so she’s been through a lot of trauma and has come out the other side. Billy absolutely trusts Lily; trusts her opinion and her gut reaction to things. Lily is really the voice of reason to him, but there’s that little bit of selfishness in him to want to drive through things.”
