Billie Piper talks marriage | motherhood and meeting the real Belle du Jour | Billie Piper is back on TV | BIllie Piper

Billie Piper is back on TV a year after having her son. She talks about marriage, motherhood — and how playing lady of the manor nearly drove her mad


As opening shots to interviews go, you don’t happen upon much jollier than Billie Piper’s. “Shall we get champagne?” she suggests. Why ever not! Within 15 minutes she’s downed a flute, accidentally knocked it over with the sleeve of her voluminous Topshop sweater dress, emptied a half-pint of fizzy water and filled it up with 50-quid-a-pop sparkle.

She’s making up for lost time. During her pregnancy she counted down the minutes before she could indulge her casual, everyday vices once more. “I became completely neurotic and saw what I’d be like without booze and fags.” A pause. And then a chuckle. “And it ain’t pretty.”

She looks stunning. At 26 and the mother of one-year-old Winston, she has grown into her big, gobstopper facial features and has shed all of her baby-weight. “It was literally just about going mental for six weeks,” she says, of her post-Winston eating regime. “I think I was quite lucky. I wasn’t massively healthy. I just ate loads of protein. It’s either that or speed pills, and the thing is you do actually have to sleep at some point. You’ve got to try and maintain a healthy marriage and I’m not sure that amphetamines are that conducive to a successful relationship.”

Clearly, she is on demonstrably Billie-esque form. It is four o’clock in the afternoon, it is Friday, and we are in the kind of posh Covent Garden environment that would have been absolute anathema to the young Billie, a labourer’s daughter with maniacally imperfect showbiz dreams, who received the news of her first No 1 single, live on the Radio 1 Chart Show, while stoned on a playground swing in a deserted park in her native Swindon. She was 16. Ever since, there has been something about this woman that cannot help but fling herself headfirst at life.

For the latter half of her pregnancy in 2008, Billie had decamped with her new, second husband, the actor Laurence Fox, to the countryside. Having tried on the clothes of teenage pop Lolita, Mrs Chris Evans, gymslip bride, surely the only Doctor Who assistant to ever out-shine her lead, and a lengthy run as the fictional incarnation of Britain’s most infamous whore, it was time to settle into the Wellington boots of Lady of the Manor for a spell.

It sounds like she went slightly demented in Midhurst, West Sussex. “I did go a bit Sylvia Plath down there,” she says, wincing a little. “Staring at the condensation on the window and wondering where it comes from. Following slugs in the garden that hadn’t moved a foot, and feeling a bit desperate. Laurence was filming when I first had Winston. I’d had an emergency caesarean and I could barely walk. I was alone in the country with a newborn baby for three weeks.

“I’m actually grateful for that time now. It forced me to be in bed with my child. And really that was the only time that I was still, with baby, without distractions or confusion. It was just the two of us. You sleep when they sleep and feed when they feed.” And when the condensation gets too much? “Then you move back to London.”

Already, she is harbouring dark fantasies about her own future manner with her son at the schoolgate. “In my head I have arguments with the mother of a ten-year-old who is picking on my son in the playground. So wrong.” She laughs. “I get really angry. And it usually ends up physical. And then I think, ‘he’s one year old, what are you doing?’

“Only the other night I was having a conversation with Laurence. I said, ‘Is it just me or can you ever imagine letting Winston walk from our house to the end of our street on his own,’ He said, ‘No, I can’t.’ So that’s it! He’s not doing it.” God help the boy’s first girlfriend.

Part of Billie’s coping mechanisms as a new mother has been to think of her situation in respect to her own mum’s, who had four children very young, in quick succession. “Hers was an absolutely selfless act of just continually handing herself over to her children. I’ve done it a bit, but I have managed to work for six months of Winston’s 12-month life.”

The other part is trying to stop herself over-analysing what being a mother means to her as a woman. “You want to work, you want to be a wife, you want to be a mum, you want to be in control but then you also want to feel small in your husband’s arms. There are wildly conflicting emotional responses to everything.”

This is a pattern in Billie’s life. She enjoys a personal, internal tussle with both her nature and nurture. “Even now, the minute someone wants to define me I feel the need to change. The minute someone tries to put their finger on who I am, I want to be something else. It’s almost like a reflex. I’m not even sure how premeditated it is. It just happens.” Is it contrariness? “I don’t know. I think maybe I started to do it actively when I was younger and now I just can’t stop. Which makes me feel like a restless human.”

She once told me she would probably marry five times. “I’ve changed my mind now. If this one doesn’t work . . .,” she touches wood, “I won’t marry again.”

At a certain point in Billie’s public life it looked very much as if she would manage to fit 20 years of Patsy Kensit’s life into five of her own. She nods at the suggestion. “Yes, I know. I am accelerated.” Is it a basic compulsion for life? “I don’t know. I think it’s just that once you start living at a certain pace it’s really hard to reign it in and once you start living a certain way it’s hard to change that. You condition yourself, to an extent.” She pours more champagne.

If her personal life has changed enormously, her professional life has seen one small but pivotal accidental feature snap into place, too. For the first four years of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, the ITV drama that became a hit in America, Billie was sworn to secrecy about the identity of her character, Belle de Jour, the high-class hooker on whose anonymous blog the series was based. She has since been revealed as 34-year-old Bristol University research scientist Brooke Magnanti.

“It makes life easier for me,” says Billie. “Not because I hadn’t been able to tell anyone about her. I never felt compelled to anyway. But because now I can actually share the burden.”

In an unusual turn of events, Billie had become an unwilling figurehead for the liberation of prostitutes. “It will be nice to have someone else to defend the story and hopefully every time there is a story in the papers on prostitution there won’t be a massive picture of my face next to it.” She found this particularly troubling while pregnant, and during the trial of the man who murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich. “I need her to share that. Rather than me having to defend her and getting tied up in knots, she can actually defend herself and her actions. It’s now her thing. It can and it has got quite vicious in the past.”

Billie says that she found the real Belle de Jour slightly intimidating in the flesh. “She’s quite steely and composed. She speaks really slowly and she’s gentle and petite and her features are quite fine. She looks like she should be quite vulnerable.” Surely a handy asset for the work? “Oh, I’m sure. But when you read her stuff you definitely feel like it’s the man who is wide-eyed and wanders in feeling out of control.

“From the way she writes, you imagine her to be quite the Amazonian power-dresser and she’s not at all. Anyway, I found her smart in a very seemingly self-assured way. All of those things make me incredibly nervous in people.”

She’s basically the opposite of you?

“Basically, yes.”

Is she hot?

“Oh, she’s got a great rack.”

"It’s not the sex that frightens us with her, it’s the fact that money changes hands. I know loads of women who have sex with different people the whole time. Sometimes it’s reckless, sometimes it’s irresponsible and sometimes it’s just absolutely joyous. It’s the way life is. But the money changing hands affects people’s opinions."

Billie made sure she was finished with breastfeeding by the time she got back to work, five months after Winston’s birth. “Playing a prostitute and breastfeeding? That would’ve just been too weird,” she laughs, taking another glug of champagne.

In her off-time she managed to fit in an off-the-cuff celebrity-packed holiday in Miami, quite by accident. After booking the Foxes, en famille, into “the most ridiculously inappropriate beach club”, she swapped hotels to the Delano. “We walked down to breakfast and there was David Walliams eating with Dale Winton. Then Matt Lucas turned up and Jimmy Carr and his lovely girlfriend Caroline and then Louis Walsh turned up and we all spent ten days around the pool together. It was brilliant fun, an absolute laugh a minute. Totally by accident.”

She had particular fun tapping Walsh for X Factor gossip. “He is wonderfully indiscreet. He actually moved down the table one night at dinner just to be able to tell us what we wanted to know. Just fabulous.”

I wonder whether she sees anything of her younger self in the X Factor hopefuls, hiking on to the showbusiness ladder at a precociously young age, with no actual idea of what’s ahead. “Really? I’ve stopped thinking about that now.”

Even when you see a young teenage pop starlet such as Pixie Lott, there isn’t a glimmer? “Oh, but I love Pixie. She looks great.”

Billie says she’ll always have a scout for a story on Pixie in the Bizarre column in The Sun. “Just to see. I think she’s dating one of McFly at the moment. You want to speak to her when she’s going out with the boy who’s going to really corrupt her.”

And Billie’s delightfully circumspect maternal instinct comes into play once more.

The new series of Secret Diary of a Call Girl starts on ITV2 tomorrow at 10pm

Source: Times Online UK News
Tags: Billie Piper, Billie Piper Talks Marriage, Motherhood of Billie Piper, Real Belle du Jour, Billie Piper Marriage, Billie Piper is back on TV, Billie Piper TV Show, Billie-esque

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