In the Showtime drama Billions, about a US Attorney going after a corrupt hedge fund manager, the very first shot of the pilot episode shows Paul Giamatti bound and gagged on the floor. A dominatrix appears, putting out a cigarette on his chest and then helpfully alleviating the burn by pissing on him. For Maggie Siff, who plays the psychiatrist-turned-dominatrix, it presented both a challenge and an opportunity. It felt smart. It made me want to know about that marriage, who those people were to each other and how they arrived there.
You get so used to that as a woman. Your standard for what is acceptable goes down because you have to do things just to survive.
After years working in regional theatre her television break came in her early 30s when she was cast to play department store heiress Rachel Menken in Mad Men. It was a role close to her heart. She reminded me of my grandmother, who grew up in the Lower East Side as a Jewish woman. It turned into a six-year job, filming for six months a year in California.
She spent her summers there and her winters back in New York with her first love, theatre. Finding good roles is a perennial problem for actresses, and one that exacerbates off-screen problems of gender inequality too. I do all that. I try to talk to people about that and make people conscious of it.
What she does is of interest to people. Alongside her television work, Siff has also turned to independent films with the hope of telling more nuanced stories about women. The film follows a successful television actress who has a nervous breakdown and returns to New York from Los Angeles to try and reclaim her old friendships and her theatre roots. For Siff, her only concern was that the film might be a little too close to the bone.
