Billions star Asia Kate Dillon: 'I cried when I read the script'

Dillon talks the power of pronouns, breaking boundaries and making history
Wall Street drama: Damian Lewis and Asia Kate Dillon as Bobby and Taylor
Ellen E. Jones15 February 2017
The Weekender

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When I first read the script for Billions I cried,” says Asia Kate Dillon, the gender non-binary actor who plays Taylor, the gender non-binary character, in this television first. “I felt here was someone who was brave enough to totally and fully be themselves. Taylor really inspired me to feel finally like: ‘Yeah, this is who I am and I don’t feel any shame or need to hide it’.”

Pronouns. For such small words they can carry a lot of weight. Yet, negotiating the “hes” “theys” and “zes” of our sophisticated post-gender world needn’t be confusing. Take your cue from a strangely uplifting scene in the new series of Billions, which starts on Sky Atlantic, next Tuesday at 9pm.

Damian Lewis’s alpha hedgie, Bobby “Axe” Axelrod, is sitting legs-on-desk in his shiny, minimalist office, listening to an investment pitch from the office goofball Maffee. With his usual no-b******* perspicacity, Axe interrupts Maffee and asks to speak to his analyst instead — the real brains behind the scheme.

In strides a new character, the shaven-headed Taylor, offering a few simple words by way of introduction: “Hello, I’m Taylor. My pronouns are ‘they’, ‘theirs’ and ‘them’.” Axe regards his new employee with a smile that’s equal parts amusement and admiration. Then he bids them to continue.

For those not quite up to speed, the phrase “gender non-binary” applies to individuals who see themselves as neither man nor woman. According to recent statistics, at least one in 250 people in the UK identify as such, and that figure goes up depending on how the question is phrased.

Dillon was assigned the gender female at birth but, like Taylor, now uses the pronoun “they”. Aside from that, the pair have little in common. Dillon’s typical everyday outfit is a T-shirt and baggy jeans, whereas Taylor’s style is more preppy. “Taylor is a left-brain person with strong math and logic skills, analytical, objective… ideal for the hedge-fund world, which I know nothing about,” says Dillon.

In other words, there is a lot more to the character than their gender identity. “The script doesn’t focus on a sort of terrible coming-out story. It’s much more well-rounded than that.”

Dillon’s own coming-out story isn’t terrible either, thanks to a childhood spent in Ithaca, a small, socially progressive enclave in upstate New York, which they describe as “a microcosm of New York City”. At school, a couple of the teachers called them by the affectionate nickname “kid”. “This was before there was any talk of my gender identity, but it always felt good. It felt like, ‘Oh, they’re seeing something about me’, y’know?”

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Only within the past few years, however, has Dillon begun publicly identifying as gender non-binary, and it was Taylor who got in there first. “I first started removing the ‘she’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ pronouns from my online material. I was just using my name in place of a pronoun and that felt really good. Then I read the script for Billions and did a little more research into non-binary and it just really clicked for me. I began integrating it right away into all of my online material and my everyday life.”

Language — those pesky pronouns again — seems to be a big sticking point for those who reject the push for a more fluid understanding of gender. Getting used to a new way of speaking can be difficult at first. At one point while talking to Dillon, I find myself replacing “gender non-binary” with the unfortunate spoonerism “non-gina-bendery”. Dillon politely overlooks this, probably because, as they later say, “I don’t sort of have the energy to correct everyone who mis-genders me.”

In any case, the reaction has mostly been positive. “I enjoy talking about it… often I just find that people are curious and actually more innately understanding of what I’m talking about than they thought they would be. They sort of go, ‘Oh, yeah! Why am I a man?’ Or ‘Why am I a woman?’ I think it’s an important conversation for anyone to have with themselves and I happen to be someone who brings that conversation up in a room.”

Leading role: Dillon on the set of Billions series two

So while Taylor wasn’t specifically written for Dillon, the role couldn’t have been more perfect. Dillon’s @eeeysia Instagram feed shows how central LGBT rights, but also Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and other social justice issues, are in their life. Even their downtime is utilised in service of the cause: they’ll admit to enjoying the occasional episode of animated sitcom Bob’s Burgers but mostly it’s non-fiction books, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s revered 2015 treatise on race, Between the World and Me. “I’m very careful with my media intake. I try and monitor it pretty carefully.”

For Dillon, not only is the personal political, the professional is too. That means acting as president of Mirror/Fire Productions, starring in a 2007 production of controversial play My Name is Rachel Corrie and their most notable previous TV role as Brandy, a member of the white supremacist gang in Orange is the New Black.

This Netflix prison dramedy is famous for a cast that’s diverse in all aspects except one — it’s almost exclusively female. Billions, by contrast, is as über-macho as the high-finance world it portrays and revolves around a high-stakes pissing contest between two alpha males: Axelrod and his nemesis, NYC district attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti).

You might imagine that Dillon would feel much more comfortable on the set of OITNB. In fact, working on both shows feels like being with “family”, they say, with a subtle rebuke to any simplistic thinkers who’d have assumed otherwise. “My impression of Wall Street growing up was certainly that it was like the big, bad place where all of the men did the bad things with our money… the incredible thing about [Billions] is that it takes that evil machine and puts many human faces on it. And it puts human faces on what I would call the ‘good machine’ of the law. It really dissects both of them.” Morality, then, is also not so binary.

Not only does non-binary Taylor make perfect sense in the grey-shaded world of Axe capital but the intelligent grace with which Taylor claims a place in the world has a wider resonance. Billions might be exactly the show to demonstrate that, far from being some fringe issue for a niche group of spoiled, rainbow-flag-waving millennials, the struggle to be who you really are, to ‘self-actualise’, is at the centre of every human’s experience.

It’s certainly a subject that Dillon often finds themself mulling over. “When I go outside and I look at all the people, I wonder how much of their identity, true identity, has been squelched by these social mores. Would that person just be wearing something totally fabulous right now? I wish everyone could just be free.” And, really, what’s so hard to understand about that?

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