Billie Piper Has Always Done Her Best Work While Falling Apart

The actor behind Elsinore's Oscar push reveals the uncomfortable engine of her best performances: personal crisis as creative fuel. It's a more honest account of acting than most interviews produce.

Billie Piper is 44, sitting in a London hotel suite during a three-day press junket for Elsinore — a British film in which Andrew Scott plays Ian Charleson, the Chariots of Fire actor who performed Hamlet at the National Theatre in autumn 1989 while dying of Aids, and died in January 1990, seven weeks after his final performance. Piper plays Charleson's best friend, casting director Patsy Pollock, in a bouncy blond wig and with the first line: 'Strong liquor, darling, as a matter of urgency!' She says that line was the clincher for taking the role. You believe her. What makes the interview unusual isn't the Oscar buzz — Scott is widely expected to sweep best actor, and Piper is in contention too — it's the absence of a publicist and the presence of a person who actually says things. Russell T Davies, who cast her as Rose in his 2005 Doctor Who reboot, described her with four words: 'earthed, primal, beautiful and clever.' The room confirms all four within minutes. There is instant intimacy, no performance of professionalism, and what looks like a genuine hunger for ideas rather than a schedule to protect. The most revealing moment comes when she casually admits that she has only ever done theatre when she was struggling personally. She links her Olivier-winning turn in Simon Stone's 2016 Yerma — Lorca's desperately childless protagonist reimagined as a 21st-century blogger, staged in a giant Perspex box with a Glastonbury sequence, described by Susannah Clapp as 'earth-quaking' and by Ben Brantley as leaving audiences 'bruised, breathless and grateful' — to her separation from Laurence Fox, with whom she has two teenage sons. 'I was quite an open wound when I played that part,' she says, 'so I had a physical need to put that somewhere.' She sees Ian Charleson's decision to play Hamlet while dying as the same instinct: not insane, but logical. The stage as the place where unbearable things get processed rather than suppressed. She connects this to the Beckett story she's just been told — that when Billie Whitelaw asked Beckett where she should look during rehearsals, he replied 'inwards' — and her reaction is a laugh so explosive it sounds like a flock of birds released into a hotel room. The delight is real. She is someone who actually encounters ideas rather than curating responses to them. Davies writes in his memoir The Queerest of Folk that during her first, very public divorce from DJ Chris Evans — whom she married at 18 — she was 'crying in a cupboard' on the Doctor Who set but 'just kept going like a demon.' The pattern has held. On the industry, she's dry and direct: the idea that women are now aligned in sisterly solidarity is 'not strictly true.' 'It's still a bit of a bloodsport. We're pitted against each other and it can breed hostility.' On social media — which she uses cautiously because 'it's useful to be unknowable' — she admits it's partly ego and commerce and would love to 'completely turn the fucker off' but doesn't. On coming out: 'Do people need to keep announcing these things? It feels like it's up to you.' None of this is performance controversy; it reads as someone saying what she thinks at the speed she thinks it. Elsinore is the context, not quite the subject. The film follows Charleson's final months through Pollock's eyes: making soup, offering gossip as comfort, kicking down metaphorical doors. Piper hasn't met the real Pollock — whose career runs from the trippy 1970s Performance to Chicken Run via Mission: Impossible and The French Lieutenant's Woman — and is diplomatically careful about speaking on her behalf. When asked what Pollock got from Charleson, her answer is clean: 'She saw an acting potential in him that other people in the industry were maybe missing slightly. She saw how gifted he was.' The same thing could be said, with minor adjustments, about Davies and Piper twenty years ago. She hasn't seen Scott's acclaimed 2017 Hamlet ('Is it on NT Home?' she asks, conspiratorially). She hasn't been offered Hamlet. When she describes what role she'd want from Shakespeare, it's Lady Macbeth — 'but I don't know. It would have to be a radical retelling.' Given her track record, that's not a hedge. It's a specification.