‘I was insanely jealous of Britney Spears’: Billie Piper on teen pop stardom, the fun of her drunk years – and making darkness funny

“Hang on, I’ll just lock the door,” says Billie Piper. She is looking a bit goth, with black hair and black nails, though her neck is wrapped in a delicate scarf; she has not quite shaken the remnants of the definitely-not-Covid flu she’s had for the last few days. “I find it so weird doing interviews in front of people,” she says. “It’s so cringe. I guess if you can completely emotionally disconnect from people around you, then it’s fine, but I just find it very tricky. Anyway. So we’re in the bathroom. Hahaha.”

Piper is now 40, and has been in the public eye since she was 15. First, she was a pop star, and is still the youngest person to debut at No 1, with her 1998 earworm Because We Want To. Then, in 2003, she became an actor, winning plaudits in Doctor Who as the Doctor’s companion Rose Tyler. Throughout, she has been a fixture of the tabloids, her two marriages followed with gruesome interest, her ups and downs tracked through a paparazzo lens.

Acting is her bread and butter, but since 2016 Piper has moved into another, artier mode. She wrote and directed her debut film, Rare Beasts, in 2019. For anyone expecting light fluff, its vicious and surreal version of an “anti-romcom” might have been a bit of a shock.

But she is here today to talk about the return of , the extraordinary series she co-created with the playwright and Succession writer , which follows the misadventures of Suzie Pickles, a former teen pop star turned beloved sci-fi actor, whose life falls apart under the combined weight of fragile egos, untrustworthy people, tabloid intrusion and a dogged self-destructive streak. Piper has spent much of her adult life dealing with being “tabloid fodder”, as she calls it, though she has previously rejected the idea that I Hate Suzie is autobiographical. Even so, she has had 25 years to work out how she feels about fame, and I suspect she knows what she is