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Though she didn’t really plan it, actress Billie Piper shocked the stuffing out of Britain’s stuffed shirts when she starred as the sexy prostitute in “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” now airing on Showtime.
After all, at 14 she’d been a Miley Cyrus type with a blooming music career and a persona as pure as Pollyanna.
“People in the U.K. were really shocked because they know me as this young family entertainment-based girl they’d watch grow up, and they found it frightening to think of me in that way. But I’ve got to do roles that professionally inspire me. So I’ll always do things that will offend people, but not for that reason. I’m just trying to take on different characters, and that’s not always going to be to everyone’s taste.”
Though she perched on top of the charts, the music business made her a war-weary veteran at 16. “I found the industry really lonely, and it was an endless stream of promotion,” she says seated in a deserted meeting room at a hotel here.
“At least with acting you do a job, you do promotion when it’s required, and provided you’re being paid well, you can take time off. But with an album and singing, it’s endlessly touring. If you’re not touring, you’re in the studio. As a young girl on my own it was just hard. So I took two years off and concentrated on getting my acting career together.”
She’d first been discovered at a theater school after a photo campaign to relaunch a pop magazine. “They’d seen images of me and they wondered if I could sing. So they very much went for the look first, then they demo-taped me and made it work.”
Her decision to forsake her music career proved seminal. “That changed me because then I hadn’t really learned how to be at home or do things for myself because I’d always had people doing things for me - how to be domestic and all those things - so that was a big change for me,” says Piper, who’s wearing a black and gray knit shirt, black pencil skirt and patent pumps.
She says she wasn’t afraid of changing careers. “Because I’d really hit rock bottom. I had awful suicidal thoughts, and I was so miserable that anything would be better than what I was doing, so I was just gung ho and set on doing that. So I was excited and it was a positive time. And it worked.”
Billie, the oldest of four, used to perform for her family at home and her mom suggested she try it professionally. At 9 her first jobs were commercials for Kool-Aid and Honeycomb cereal. Her very first role, following her singing career, was a modern version of Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale.” Then she became “Dr. Who’s” toothsome sidekick, Rose Tyler, for several seasons.
Married to her second husband, actor Laurence Fox, Piper says they met while doing a Christopher Hampton play together. “The play was 2 ½ years ago and we fell lucky-in-love and we had a baby. We’ve been married a year, together for two and had our baby in October. We’re right for each other, it’s a nice feeling.”
She’d known Fox for three days when she impulsively invited him to accompany her to New York. “I said, ‘I know ultimately you’re a stranger. Let’s go and spend four days together in another country, in a romantic city.’ And that was quite bold now when I think about it because I didn’t know the guy at all. I said, ‘Let’s go.’ I’d taken big risks with work but they always felt like natural progressions and they always made sense, whereas this one didn’t really make sense.”
Also, she’d vowed never to date an actor. “I found actors so self-obsessed and vain and egotistical and megalomaniacs. I really always loved the company of actors because they’re so much fun and so neurotic and really thoughtful people as well. And I’ve always enjoyed their company as friends but I just thought I could never go out with one.
“Then I met Laurence and I thought, ‘Oh, God, this is going to be bad because I’m going to have to try and ask you out. And I’m going to go against all my rules.’ But he’s not like the other actors I’ve met. He’s very smart and intense and very thoughtful and sensitive and those were the reasons that outweighed the fact that we’re in the same profession and that can get difficult. You just have to go with your heart.”
Still, mixing the two careers can be taxing, she admits. “With the baby I don’t want to break our family up so we’re going to work one at a time. I think you’ve got to work out which is going to make you more happy in the long run. And as much as I love what I do, my biggest joy comes from being with my family. That doesn’t mean that making these decisions to turn things down will be any easier.”
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One of the funnier shows to grace TV these days continues to be CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory,” which spoofs the nerds but is also full of authentic scientific data. One of the show’s creators and executive producer, Chuck Lorre, says, “We are the only show, I believe, maybe ever, that emails scripts to the Antarctic where our consultant is - doing particle research.”
“Right now, our consultant, Dr. David Saltzberg, a professor of astrophysics at UCLA, is in the Antarctica working on ... an experiment, and the scripts have gone back and forth from Antarctica and phone calls a couple of times,” adds Bill Prady, also creator and executive producer. “He sends us pictures of his equipment, if this gives you an idea of what kind of guy he is. He’s on the bottom of the world. He sends pictures of his equipment.”
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Conan O’Brien will become the fifth host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show” on June 1 and is already spinning with plans. “Johnny Carson said once, ‘These shows are all about the person behind the desk,’ and that’s absolutely true,” he says.
“So I would need a brain transplant to deliver a completely different show. I’d need to have a neurological breakdown and develop a whole new personality. But that said, we are going to try and do a lot of new things. I think it is an opportunity. I don’t want it to be toned down at all ... I think the show just needs to be funny. I think these shows are always a work-in-progress. If you look at my late night show, it’s changed a lot since 1993. We’re always coming up with new bits to do, new things to try. I think there are a number of bits that are on the late night that would work fine as ‘Tonight Show’ bits. But what’s most important to me is that we use this as an opportunity to invent new things.”
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Bryan Cranston will be breaking bad again in his Emmy-winning role on AMC’s “Breaking Bad” March 8. Cranston, who played the goofy dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” for so many years, remembers what it was like to hear his named called on Emmy night.
“I had three previous nominations so - and didn’t win, so I was pretty comfortable with not winning and familiar with that feeling, and I was preparing myself for the same thing. My wife, on the other hand, was starting to hyperventilate a little bit and get sweaty palms, which is very attractive, one of the reasons I married her.
“And I just told her, ‘Relax, don’t get all worked up because they’re not going to mention my name. We had seven episodes, and let’s just have fun and enjoy this.’ And then Keifer Sutherland said, ‘Bryan Cranston,’ and the first millisecond of that I went ‘That sounds familiar.’ And then you realize, ‘Oh, my God, that’s - that’s me.’
“The one thought I had after I kissed my family and started to walk up on the stage was, ‘Please, please, God, let me put a sentence together with a - you know, a nice noun and a verb and adjective, perhaps. I’m not too choosy. And not to say, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, God. This is so surreal. Oh, God. Oh.’ Times up. ‘Oh, God, oh, God. Oh, wow.”’
“Because, you know, you don’t want to look back on that and go, ‘That’s what I said?’ So hopefully I said something that was coherent and appreciative, which is how I felt, and it was a wonderful night.”
