When "Billions" Season 2 premiered on Feb. 19 on Showtime with the episode "Risk Management," it introduced an interesting character Taylor. Played by "Orange is the New Black" alum Asia Kate Dillon, Taylor Mason is the first nonbinary character in a TV series.
Dillon's character is an intern at Axe Capital. It did not take long before Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) was attracted to Taylor's keen intelligence and refusal to stick to the traditional values of hedge funders.
Both nonbinary, Dillon and Taylor use the pronoun "they." In an interview with Vulture, the actor talked about their gender identity and their "Billions" character.
For Dillon, it is very important to Taylor to be always getting as much information as they possibly can. This naturally happens for the character as they are a sponge for information and it translates physically into them, the actor noted.
Viewers may notice how the "Billions" character makes direct eye contact when they are speaking with someone. According to Dillon, Taylor believes that looking a person in the eye is the best way to pick up on the energy not only of the room but also of the person they are interacting with.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, David Levien's "Billions" co-creator Brian Koppelman explained why Taylor was added to the cast of the Showtime series. According to Koppelman, they were looking for a character that Axe could see himself in.
Axe could potentially groom Taylor and the two characters are equally smart, Koppelman said. It was very interesting to the "Billions" creators to introduce a brilliant and ambitious gender non-binary character who could take the moral inventory of the people in the hedge funds world dominated by males.
For Koppelman, casting Dillon in "Billions" seemed really worth doing. He pointed out that they noticed "the way gender has become something that we're all discussing and learning knowing more about and grappling with."
Meet Dillon's "Billions" character here: