When Showtime announced that it was hiring Paul Giamatti to play a crusading U.S. attorney on its new financial drama Billions, we here at The A.V. Club went way out on a limb with rampant, dangerous speculation that the role might call for Giamatti to raise his famously level voice. But just like it did for sinister billionaire Bobby Axelrod, played by Homeland’s Damian Lewis, our reckless gambling paid off big, with a new trailer showing Giamatti with his dander fully up, shouting angry implications about another man’s crotch.
The Billions trailer doesn’t mess around, focusing directly on the Emmy-off between Giamatti’s teeth-clenched righteousness and that face that Lewis makes, the one where you’re not sure if he’s about to kiss you or just set off a bomb. Between the two of them and all the steely looks, condescending smirks, and icily delivered insults they’re throwing around, it’s almost enough to distract from the fact that the show’s most action-packed moment involves a “suspect trading pattern” blinking its way across a washed-out computer monitor, in the hottest piece of spreadsheet suspense since the tutorial video for Quicken.