It’s late morning at the Langham hotel in London, a croissant’s throw from the BBC’s famed glass frontage on Portland Place. We’re here because the national broadcaster is the setting for actor Billie Piper’s buzzy new film Scoop, a jaw-dropping, wig-touting, prosthetics-laden dramatization of how Newsnight secured that Prince Andrew interview during the white heat of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Piper plays the flagship current affairs program’s real-life booker Sam McAlister, whose tenacity in 2019 is credited with placing Emily Maitlis inside Buckingham Palace opposite the soon-to-be former HRH for an hour of monarchy-shaking, fury-inducing, history-making television.
No stranger to the nuclear properties of modern media herself, Piper’s casting in a world of hot-button news comes with its own sprinkle of meta. She arrives today in (relatively) low-key fashion—delightfully theatrical still, of course—traversing the marbled lobby in jeans and a jet black shearling-cuffed coat, sunglasses in hand. She’s requested a quiet corner and a certain degree of tact. Who can blame her. In recent years, the unwanted churn of national attention has pulled her in too, ever since she divorced Laurence Fox, an actor turned anti-woke campaigner (I suppose “campaigner” is the kindest moniker one might apply). Though, in truth, Billie, now 41, has had years of strife—what with ’90s child stardom, a tabloids-breaking teenage marriage, and the sort of turn-of-the-millennium fame that would drive the sanest among us to the edge.
And yet she smiles. The hug is warm, the eyes kind, the laughter throaty and frequent. She’s not seen the final cut of Scoop yet, and is touchingly nervous to hear what I thought of it. “Does it work?” It so works, I reply. What a treat to see you on screen again. Visibly relieved, she orders some scrambled eggs—“medium runny, do you have Tabasco?”—and allows for the fact that she says no to most jobs. “I don’t work a lot for a few reasons,” she says, her voice still that pleasing mashup of neo-posh and ’90s cool girl.
“I don’t like being away from my kids,” she continues, “and I don’t like much that I read.” Surely you get sent plenty? She times a perfect pause: “Could be more…”
An actor of rare ability, the best of Piper’s stage work is up there with Judi Dench or Glenda Jackson, yet there remains a curious boundarylessness to her career. While not underhyped, exactly, her peripatetic celebrity is unusual enough for some to forget her powers. She is, for example, still the youngest woman to ever have a solo single debut at number one in the UK (1998’s “Because We Want To”—she was 15), while also being the only person to sweep all six of London theater’s best actress awards, including an Olivier, in a single year (Yerma, The Young Vic, 2017). It’s true that she takes long stints off, so when she does materialize from the ether—in, say, HBO’s cult comedy I Hate Suzie or playwright Lucy Prebble’s original production of The Effect at the National—audiences are usually guaranteed an event.