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Welcome to Miss Billie Piper! Site dedicated to award winning actress, Billie Piper. She will be making her directorial debut in 'Rare Beasts' in 2020/21. 'I Hate Suzie' will be airing on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in August 2020! Stay tuned for updated content and exclusive images and posts!

May 11, 2014  No comments Interviews
Billie Piper is talking about “special effects” and “action sequences” with all the enthusiasm you would expect from someone who has signed up to make a multimillion-pound TV series airing on both sides of the Atlantic. She can riff on the show’s main themes and the script – and we are just getting on to the point about the “dexterous text” when she says: “I’m sure this is all really boring. I play a prostitute. I’m just in it for the sex!”
Piper has an excellent sense of humour: a mischievous giggle, a willingness to sacrifice her point for the sake of a good joke. It’s why she’s so brilliant on chat shows – the last time I saw her, on Alan Carr’s Chatty Man, she imitated a dance move popularised in the Channel 4 series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding for laughs. She also told of how she had recently found a “filthy nightclub” on a night off from looking after her sons, making me wonder if Billie Piper is still quite the wild child.

She’s certainly played a few of them on screen. Just three years after hanging up the whip she wielded while playing hooker Belle de Jour in ITV’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Piper is back simulating sex on film sets for a major new TV series. Set in Victorian London, Penny Dreadful is a big production, a 10-part thriller written by John Logan and executive produced by Sam Mendes. As Piper explains, it’s “a more darkly dressed version” of a period drama: “Savage and gory. Loads of blood. Loads of sex.” It certainly has more of the spirit of Game of Thrones than Downton Abbey (and, like GoT, it is filmed on an enormous set in Ireland).

It also features a roster of international stars, including Timothy Dalton,Josh Hartnett and Eva Green, who – with Piper – play the series’ principal characters. The rest of the roles are based on popular literary characters from the time: Dorian Gray, Mina Harker, Victor Frankenstein. It’s a brilliant mash-up: she plays an Irish immigrant called Brona Croft who speaks with a thick Belfast accent. Nude or not, Piper manages to be both gregarious and vulnerable and steals the show in pretty much every scene she’s in.

I’m assuming that by now Piper has no problem with sex scenes. This month she will also star in Foxtrot, a 30-minute film written for the Sky Arts Playhouse Presents strand by young playwright Polly Stenham (who won rave reviews for her Royal Court debut That Face at the age of 19). In what’s becoming a “bit of a running theme”, Piper is playing another prostitute. “I don’t know why I’m always asked – I try not to overthink it,” she laughs.

It was the abstractness and theatricality of the Playhouse series – now in its third run, with a cast as diverse as Matthew Perry and Cara Delevigne– that attracted Piper to it, along with the opportunity to work directly with two other actors, Lindsay Duncan and Ben Whishaw, who have won plaudits for their stagework.

Having starred in two plays in 2012 and 2013 – Reasons to be Pretty at the Almeida and The Effect at the National Theatre (she was nominated for an Olivier for the latter) – Piper has got the bug: “I think I just enjoy getting slightly wound up,” she says, not entirely messing around. “To me, going to the theatre every night and putting myself through that process is like a strange sort of drug.”

The cast of Penny Dreadful (l to r): Josh Hartnett as Ethan Chandler, Billie Piper as Brona Croft, Harry Treadaway as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray, Timothy Dalton as Sir Malcolm and Danny Sapani as Sembene. Photograph: Showtime 2014She is looking to do another play this year. She has signed a big contract for Penny Dreadful, so it might be challenging; if the show gets re-commissioned, she says it could become her “life for the next six or seven years”. I wonder how she feels about that: earlier in our chat she had described her struggle playing Rose Tyler, the first assistant of the revived Doctor Who, for two years, remembering it as “almost impossible. It was very hard to have a life and take care of my family because I was always away in Cardiff. Also, it was a totally different level of fame. I don’t miss that, myself.”

If you only knew the bare facts about Piper, it might be hard to swallow the idea that she could be turned off by too much notoriety. This is the girl who left her hometown, Swindon, at the age of 12 to go to the Sylvia Young stage school in London, and was on TV three years later, blowing bubblegum in an advert for Smash Hits magazine. Pretty soon after that, at 15, she launched a pop career and had her first number one hit with“Because We Want To” in 1998. This feat made her the youngest debut artist in history to top the charts.

In 2001 Piper sensationally quit music to elope with Chris Evans, 16 years her senior, and was frequently pictured in the tabloids with him on boozy benders. They married when Piper was 18 – in Vegas – in what appeared to be the ultimate act of rebellion. But Piper maintained that they were in love, even if she did feel a compulsion to escape the pressures of a pop career that she’d ignited so young.

As we have seen in the reality series The Big Reunion, up for a Bafta this year, this was an era of pop that was incredibly tough. Given that the show has featured so many of Piper’s peers (including her ex-fiancé, Ritchie Neville, from the boy band 5ive), has she been tempted to watch?

“I did see a few minutes of the first series,” she shudders, slightly clamming up. “But I just couldn’t watch it without feeling incredibly tense.” She sighs. “It was such a rough ride for a lot of people at the time… the industry was such a beast and it was making so much money – for everyone but the acts. And the truth of it was that they worked you likedogs.”

She talks about “the ambition of children” in conjunction with the greed of music bosses. Is she saying that they were partly to blame? “We were just kids, but we were out there, going: ‘Love me, love me, love me.’ And we were impressed, like: ‘Wow, I was just doing a paper round and now I’m doing the Smash Hits tour.'”

Piper claims not to have kept in touch with anyone from that time, “because we weren’t friends. We were just five years of passing ships. My friends were my dancers, or my family.”

Now 31, her personal life has changed dramatically in the past few years. In 2007 she married the scion of the Fox acting dynasty, Lewis actorLaurence Fox, with whom she now has two children, Winston, five, and Eugene, two. In place of a wedding ring she has the letters F-O-X tattooed on her finger. The two lead characters in Stenham’s Playhouse play are called Fox and Badger. Is she playing Fox? “No, I’m called Badger,” she grins. “Which I love. I love that name.” For a girl or a boy? “For a girl, but then she’d be Badger Fox. Or maybe Badge… But no! I don’t think we could.”

Relatively recently, the Fox clan moved back to London (although they still go back to their home in the country regularly) for work. “I’ve been flying to Dublin back and forth and Laurence has been in plays.” This was after Piper had a spell at home with her children – “for quite a long time, really”. Was she tempted to stay and quit acting, the way Lily Allen vowed to quit music? “I think if you’re creative that’s a bit unrealistic. You can’t stamp it out. But of course there are times when I am like: ‘I hate this!’ and I just want to be with my children in peace and quiet. But everybody has that. And there are other days where you go: ‘Ooh, what if I did that…'”

In addition to acting – which Piper will have been doing for a decade this year – she has other creative ambitions. “There are some other areas I would like to explore,” she says coyly, “but I don’t really want to discuss them, because it’s just pressure to make them real.” But is it safe to say she wouldn’t go back to music? “Yes. Definitely not. That much is true.” So does she want to be a breakdancer or something? “No,” she laughs. “But I would love my children to do that.”

The constant changes in direction, the flitting between artforms, her kaleidoscopic public life/career… A psychologist would say that she doesn’t like to be pigeonholed.

“I would like to know what a psychologist has to say about it, actually,” Piper bats back. “It might be very helpful.” Has she ever seen one? “I did, when I was young. I just found the whole thing really unhelpful and I felt like [the psychologist] wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know about myself. It was… very shortsighted. It was at the beginning of a process that I opted out from. So, you know, maybe [I did that] unfairly.”

She doesn’t think she has any major psychological problems to fix, though? “I think maybe I’m just restless… as a person.” Always? “Yeah.” Does that make her worry? “Yeah. But I just think you’re either wired that way or you’re not. Members of my family are like that as well.”

“It’s funny,” she adds, “because maybe you just have to accept that that’s your lot – that you’re like that.” I think it’s more funny that she’s using the phrase “accept your lot” to validate her sense of adventure, her desire to break her own norms. “But maybe I will just settle one day,” she says. “Who knows?”

Knowing the Billie Piper we have seen so far, it’s unlikely.

Penny Dreadful starts on Sky Atlantic on 20 May at 9pm. Foxtrot will air on 29 May at 9pm on Sky Arts 1






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