At the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, just ahead of Halloween weekend, Billie Piper held a masterclass for college students. “It was basically me just rattling on about being an actor — I hope some of it was useful, not sure,” she says the next day from a quiet library in the Southern city’s downtown. “Their line of questioning was so insightful and kind of ahead of their years. They were all there with the little moleskin books taking notes. I just didn’t expect that.”
She’d have little reason to. Despite her decades in the business, despite the Olivier Award win and five BAFTA nominations, the English native hasn’t really traveled the film-festival circuit before. She came to town as an honoree for the Oscar contender Elsinore, receiving the Marquee Award for her vivacious turn as the imperious real-life casting director Patsy Pollock.
In spending time with the kids before the festivities kicked off, it dawned on her: “I actually thought: ‘God, I’ve done some really great jobs.’”
She arrives today with dark brown hair, a far cry from the striking blonde of Elsinore and her other most noted screen roles, and a tablet that she occasionally flashes open to reference movies she’s either seen recently or intends to soon watch. “It’s really fired me up about independent movies again,” she says of running around in support of Elsinore. (The film launched at Telluride, where star Andrew Scott emerged as an instant best-actor front-runner, and has since played all over the world.) “I felt like it was all dead, but it wasn’t dead. I just feel so jacked about all the movies I’m seeing.”
An intensely chameleonic actress unafraid to go big, Piper has never had the largest footprint in the feature space. “Often the films that I read weren’t that good for women,” she says. We may be at something of a turning point. Already, she’s received her first career British Independent Film Award nomination for Elsinore, competing in a supporting category alongside returning faces like Claire Foy and Tom Courtenay.
After breaking out as a teen pop star, the now-44-year-old has always followed the best work. She made her name onscreen by leading series like Doctor Who and Secret Diary of a Callgirl, then as a major stage actor in West End productions of The Effect and Yerma. For the latter revival of Federico García Lorca’s classic, she remains the only actor to have won every official Best Actress prize currently awarded for a single UK theater performance. She wowed again in HBO Max’s I Hate Suzie, a brilliant panic attack of a dark comedy about a moderately famous actress thrown into turmoil when nude photos on her phone leak online.
I Hate Suzie.
HBO MAX
For one reason or another, these projects didn’t land with as much force in the US as back home. Indeed, Piper co-created I Hate Suzie with her Effect playwright Lucy Prebble, and the show aired right after other stellar series from British female multihyphenates, like Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. Rest assured, Piper’s BAFTA-nominated performance is every bit as ferociously compelling — and revealing — as what her peers delivered in those Emmy-winning smashes.
For a good chunk of American audiences, at least, Suzie remains a hidden streaming gem waiting to be discovered. Piper seems comfortable in that zone.
**
Elsinore dramatizes the heartbreaking, inspiring final act of Ian Charleson, a gay actor not out publicly who was known for his starring role in Chariots of Fire. Charleson decided, shortly after being diagnosed with AIDS, to play Hamlet at the National Theatre while fighting for his life — and somehow pulled it off. Scott’s turn as the late great dominates the movie, but Piper becomes its sneaky heart. Patsy, Charleson’s best friend, emerges as his caretaker and as an anchor in their defiant chosen family.
“Their relationship was beautiful chaos,” Piper says. “They partied hard. He was a big figure in her daughter’s life. She was a single mother working in a male-dominated industry.” When it came to Charleson’s controversial choice to play Hamlet — his doctor, portrayed by Olivia Colman, was initially firmly against it — Patsy simply got it. So did Piper. “It makes complete sense to want to play one of, if not the most challenging parts at your most vulnerable point in your life as you approach your death,” Piper says. “Patsy understood that about him. I understand that about what he chose to do as well. I think a lot of actors get it, to be honest.”
Piper at the Gala Screening of Elsinore during the 29th SCAD Savannah Film Festival.
Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SCAD
Elsinore is a tearjerker, no doubt, but it’s stuffed with joy. Piper brings plenty of levity with her glamorous, haughty embodiment of an old showbusiness powerhouse. She is clearly having a ball. “I really miss people like Patsy in our industry — the larger-than-life characters — because everything’s so serious and there’s no money now,” Piper says. “It was fun to pull from the characters I knew in my early career. There were agents I had who were cut from a different cloth. It wasn’t all terribly kind, but it was unlike anybody I’d grown up with — the flamboyance, the drama, the quick shifts in tone and mood.”
Her chemistry with Scott is undeniable. The two veterans of the London theater scene previously worked together on Lena Dunham’s critically acclaimed Catherine Called Birdy, including a birthing scene for the ages. Like Piper, Scott is plenty decorated back home, but his frequent co-star finds him unusually playful to work with.
“With that skillset, you expect someone who’s a bit of a dick, but he’s not remotely a dick — he is warm, he is generous, he is informal. The work feels casual,” Piper says of Scott. “He takes it seriously, of course — he knows what he wants and knows what he likes — but it’s not the only thing that’s happening in his life, which I think is healthy.”
Piper can relate. She’s a mother of three and values the separation of the personal and professional. “I do my work, then I go home and am a parent — and so there’s no real processing of what I’ve done in the day, which is often really thrilling and rare and something I’d wanted to do since I was a child,” she says. Take, for instance, the job she’s just come back from: Wednesday season three. Piper grew up on Tim Burton and was now surrounded by his and his team’s singular designs. She got to act opposite the likes of Winona Ryder. And she was gone for nine months, a very long time. Too long, maybe.
“I haven’t worked on a nine-month shoot since Doctor Who, and I left that show for a reason,” she says. “The gratitude is there, but also it’s not without a cost.” Now, of course, she’s even further away, in the American south: “I’m doing a lot of being away. I feel terrible and also excited.”
Some viewers read into the whirring, control-obsessed anxiety of Piper’s I Hate Suzie tour-de-force as a thinly veiled commentary on her own struggles as an artist in the public eye. (Suzie’s career beginnings mirrored Piper’s to some degree.) The show was fiction, of course, but Piper’s guttural performance came from somewhere true.
“It’s really fun to play,” Piper says now, “but it’s just no way to live your life.”
The lesson took some learning. “I need things to be beyond good for me to take it seriously, to take myself seriously — it’s really got nothing to do with anyone else, but with insane levels of achievement,” Piper says. “It’s dysfunctional. I’ve been like that since I was a kid.” She believed the work should feel painful, that it should take everything out of her. She credits Yerma, which she performed in London and New York from 2016-2018 under the direction of Simon Stone — who so happens to be the director of Elsinore — with ushering in a new way forward in that regard.
“Simon completely changed my career for me — completely changed the way I looked at acting,” Piper says. “That’s a nice thing to have in a career that has been going on for a long time, to suddenly work with someone that completely rips up the rule book.”
Brick by brick, Piper is building a thrilling new chapter on that experience. Elsinore has proven a cozy fit. Not just as an awards-bound prestige movie offering her a meaty supporting role — also in the way it’s welcoming her into spaces she’s never even thought much of before. Her main goal this awards season? To hang out with Club Kid writer-director-star Jordan Firstman. “I’ve watched Rotting in the Sun about five times. It’s so funny and so free,” she says, referring to Sebastián Silva’s graphic meta comedy that starred Firstman as a vapid version of himself. “Now I just want to be his best mate.”
She’s written a film that she describes as “romantic horror,” which she’s planning to direct. (Her feature debut, Rare Beasts, premiered at Venice in 2019.) She knows it will be difficult to get off the ground. But she’s been feeling inspired by what she’s seeing. “It’s really useful going into a process of trying to get a film made that may never happen, may never see the light of day — it’s energized my passion,” she says.
Same goes for the students with whom she spent the previous afternoon.
“Even though we live in this difficult day and age, even though it might feel more compromised and frightening in terms of a career choice, they still want to pursue this,” Piper says. “There is still this appetite for the arts. I find it quite moving.”
**
Elsinore opens in limited North American theatrical release on November 20.
