Expect a little poker action in an upcoming episode in the hit US television series Billions; news reports and tweets from Phil Hellmuth and Brandon Cantu indicate that the two poker aces have been hired to play parts in the second series of the runaway hit program, which took off soon after its premiere at the beginning of 2016.
Hellmuth and Cantu have both tweeted on the punishing shooting schedule that actors face in preparing the series, with Hellmuth tweeting: “Man, actors work hard!! @Lewis_Damian hit the @SHO_Billions set yesterday at 6:30 AM, left 10:20 PM! Back before 9 AM…”
Cantu agreed, posting: “What a day 16 Hrs of filming. I’ll never watch a show the same again after knowing how much work goes into a scene.”
Billions has a top cast headed by Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti, who respectively play a canny and free-wheeling financial entrepreneur and a state Attorney General intent on prosecuting him. The current storyline in series 2 is apparently based on the famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) US Attorney Preet Bharara – the federal prosecutor who is widely credited with shuttering Full Tilt Poker and Pokerstars in the US back in 2011’s Black Friday.