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 dramatisation of how Newsnight secured that Prince Andrew interview during the white heat of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Piper plays the flagship current affairs programme’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), whose views run so toxic he’s even been barred from GB News. 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 Dench or 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 No1 in the UK (1998’s “Because We Want To” – she was 15), while also being the only person to sweep all six of London theatre’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 materialise from the ether – in, say, Sky’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.
Scoop is no exception. Like episodes of The Crown, the film comes courtesy of director Philip Martin (Peter Moffatt has adapted McAlister’s memoir into a lean, pacey 90-minute cat-and-mouse thriller). Unlike The Crown, however, the kid gloves are off. “Work, for me anyway, at this point in my life, has to mean something. I have to really want in on that female character,” Piper explains. Enter Newsnight producer Sam, a peroxide blonde, Fendi-adoring former barrister and single mum who was square-pegging her way around the Beeb during one of its many gloom-laden rounds of layoffs at the tail end of the last decade. “She is an absolute force,” says Piper of McAlister. “She is it.”
“I didn’t know anything about her and yet I knew everything about that interview,” she continues. “I was obsessed with it. I was obsessed with the whole Epstein/Maxwell story, even though that’s not what this is. I had spent hours reading and watching and getting furious.” Fury fuelled her mission, though as filming approached last year she was anxious. “Everyone has seen that interview – it’s been ripped and memed to fuck.” Indeed. Who can forget the invocation of Pizza Express, Woking, as an alibi, or a stated inability to sweat. “How are we now going to tell a very serious story that people had been outraged by but mostly laughed at?” wondered Piper. “We know that the interview is going to happen. How is the story interesting?”
Yet my jaw was on the floor. Scoop places a trio of women at its nexus – McAlister, former Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis (Gillian Anderson) and Prince Andrew’s former private secretary Amanda Thirsk (Keeley Hawes) – each with her own agenda. Thirsk believes once people experience the imagined charm and relatability of the “real” Andrew via the power of telly, he’ll outrun the Epstein charges, no bother; Maitlis, whippet in tow, is laser-focused on what she immediately senses will be the interview of her career; McAlister simply has everything to prove.
A dark shadow of toxic privilege is cast by Rufus Sewell, whose Prince Andrew, complete with teddy bears stacked on the bed and walks in Central Park with a convicted sex trafficker, has the unsettling air of verisimilitude. “Trousers!” he shouts, mildly confused when Maitlis turns up to interview him not in a skirt, before wondering why everyone is so hung up on his Epstein friendship: “I was much closer with Jimmy Savile.” Piper says she nearly walked when Sewell was cast – “C’mon, way too handsome” – then was as bowled over by his physical transformation as audiences will be.
As for the actual Prince Andrew, well... “I think by this point we all agree ‘not good’ don’t we?” she says, evenly. In terms of monarchy more generally she sits on the anti side of ambivalence. “[My views] have changed over the years, let’s say. I love the art,” she adds of the Royal Collection,“but I have strong feelings about some of the things that have happened in the last few years and I suppose I deal with it all through my work. [Making Scoop] felt quite heavy in that sense – heavily British.” Flawed institutions, social media storms, memes, despair: “It’s a funny old place,” she says of the UK in 2024. “It’s getting funnier – and less funny.” She pauses for a moment, tiling her head. “You know that line where ‘funny-haha’ meets ‘fucking hell’?”
Piper knows that line. Too well, one supposes. Her default setting is honesty and soon our conversation drifts to her “mind-blowing” life. Forged in the fires of teenage fame, Billie says it was a little over a decade ago that she felt a sea change occur within her. Firstly it affected her working practice: the roles she would take, the stories she wanted to tell: “For some reason there are things that I just become obsessed with and I often think it’s anything to do with the abuse of women. I just hate it, but I want to know about what has happened too.”
This goes no little way to explaining her specific power as an actor in recent years. She recalls the moment the shift took hold. “It’s coming out of your 20s, there’s enough stuff in your life to look over and go, ‘Oh, that’s been a pattern of behaviour.’” Such as? “There was a point where I realised I had been drawn into siding with men on a lot of things. I became incredibly frustrated and angry about that.” Piper speaks slowly, considering each syllable. “I felt very unhinged in my early 30s and kind of mentally not well. There was something very, very sobering about that time and letting go of people that weren’t very healthy for me. Unfortunately, a lot of that has been in relation to men I suppose.”
The reset had been a long time coming. “I’d grown up in a world that was dominated by men,” she explains. “They always had the last word at home, which could be frightening.” Born in 1980s Swindon, the daughter of Paul and Mandy, Piper was a “frighteningly ambitious” (her words) child, who by the age of 12 was on a scholarship at Sylvia Young Theatre School (same year as Amy Winehouse). The in-school agency had immediate success with her, and before long she was spotted by some music execs on a telly ad for Smash Hits magazine. They thought she had the perfect look for pop and so, at age 14, she was living on her own in a London hotel room and recording her first tracks.
“I became very famous very young, and went into the music industry, which was another place where you were told what to do by men,” she says. “Sometimes I wanted to appeal to them, so that I could feel safe. Sometimes I wanted to be them because it looked like they were having a better time than I was. It was a period of time in the 1990s where it was just very, very male heavy. I felt a huge amount of frustration about that.” She sighs: “And I carried that into my romantic relationships.”
They weren’t all bad. Chris Evans – DJ and entrepreneur, whom she married when she was 18, he 35 – still gets a glowing review. “I’m not someone who thinks all men are bastards but I was exposed to a lot of stuff, let’s say, and I consider him one of the good guys.” Did people lose their minds about the age difference then as they would now? “Oh, yeah, sure, people would shout things about the age gap at us in the street. Street trolling,” she says, laughing at the idea of a pre-Twitter world, before catching herself. “I mean it was pretty terrifying actually.” The eternal interest in her first marriage mystifies her though. “People still ask me about it at parties. Strangers! It was 20 years ago. It makes slightly more sense to constantly be asked about husband number two, but even then I resent that because we’ve been separated for almost 10 years.”
The whole point, she reasons, is that she doesn’t want to sit here defining herself in terms of her past relationships. She is willing for the first time to speak a little about Laurence Fox, however. “Of course I have feelings on that, I’m not dead inside,” she says, keen for people to know that it affects her deeply. You sense her social consciousness, her working mission at this stage of her life, might have left her feeling total silence is untenable.
One imagines – actually scratch that, perhaps one can’t imagine – how hard the situation must be on her; to be coparenting a 15- and an 11-year-old with someone who in the days after we meet, in the most recent twist of a long and sorry tale, will lose a libel case at the High Court against a former Stonewall trustee and a drag artist he called paedophiles on the internet (in return one had called him a racist: an accusation the court had no quibble with).
It feels like a uniquely modern nightmare. “I’ve had to make some choices and a divorce speaks for itself,” she says, followed by a very specific brand of grown-up laughter. “Or at least it should!” Her laughing sets me off too, before I immediately apologise. “Don’t worry, you have to laugh because it’s a lot,” she says. “It’s a good way of kind of soothing yourself.”
She continues: “Look, if people want to try and understand the workings of the guy, they ought to either ask him or his family. Ask [Fox’s brother-in-law, actor and comedian] Richard Ayoade what he thinks, or his wife [Fox’s actor sister] Lydia. They might have a more interesting take.” Meanwhile Piper says her entire focus is the kids. “What is paramount for me is the privacy and anonymity of my children. They deserve not to be extensions of the parents and to forge their own identities.”
But how do you go about coparenting in a situation like this? “With enormous difficulty,” replies Billie, solemnly. What happens when a storm of his creation explodes? “I close everything down and keep a very strict routine with the kids so that there’s consistency. I keep them close. That’s all I can do.” Even friends and acquaintances can get annoying by the sounds of it. “I try to keep people from telling me stuff but it’s really, really hard. I don’t read it but everyone wants to talk about it. Sometimes I have to say to people: ‘Please don’t bring this to me, now or ever.’”
Understandably, having lingered on the L word for several minutes now, Billie is starting to bleak out. She catches herself and laughs. “What’s a positive spin on this?” she says, hitting the table in jest, before answering her own question earnestly. “It’s made me feel stronger in many ways. I’ve learnt I have a lot of resilience I didn’t know I had. I’ve had to learn the hard way that you can only control yourself and how you react to things. It’s really fucking hard,” she says, with admirable calm. “I hate that.”
After the school run, most mornings Piper can be found in the study of her Camden town house. Having laboured for several lifetimes under the gaze of audiences in arenas and playhouses, or for 10 million Doctor Who fans on a Saturday night, her energy is once again shifting. “I can lose myself in writing way more than I can in acting now,” she says, of the romantic comedy she is in the process of finishing, a follow up to Rare Beasts, the anti-rom-com she wrote and directed in 2019.
Though now separated, for the past eight years or so, she had been in a relationship with the musician Johnny Lloyd (“a very good man”), and five years ago the pair added Tallulah to the Piper clan. Weekends are typically spent at her country bolthole on the Dorset coast, and though Billie is down to only a couple of rave-ups a year, she still adores the pub. She is considering taking up a barre class. There is peace amid the chaos.
“I do worry about it though,” she says, not of the obvious trials of her life, but of feeling herself move away from acting. “It does concern me.” Why? Mortgage? “Yeah, exactly!” she says, then cackles. “No, with acting I like it,” is how she describes the sensation, “but I don’t love it or need it like I did in my 20s. I wonder if I don’t like being an actor for hire any more because I can’t control the outcome in the way I would want to, whereas before I didn’t give a shit.” She pauses a final time. “Because these days I really do give a shit, you know.”
Scoop will be on Netflix from 5 April
Photographs: Olivia Arthur. Styling: Harry Lambert. Hair: James Rowe. Make-up: Lauren Reynolds. Nails: Chisato Yamamoto. Production: Diana Eastman
