Hannah and Belle’s lives are starting to overlap in the fourth and final series of Secret Diary Of A Call Girl. Billie Piper, who is married to Lewis actor Laurence Fox, with whom she has a two-year-old son, Winston, reveals more about Belle’s exploits and admits she wouldn’t rule out working with her husband…
Is this definitely going to be the last series of Secret Diary Of A Call Girl?
Yes, and it’s all quite weird this year because the drama is very heightened. And the fact that Belle’s two lives are overlapping means she’s losing it a bit. She’s slightly unraveling! But I do love the character.
Did you have to do much research before taking on the role?
Yes because I knew nothing about prostitution, apart from the stuff we’re exposed to, which is so different to what this show is. So it was almost like you had to start afresh really because the real Belle has this attitude towards sex that’s so different to most of us. And you have to meet that person to make this idea human. You can make sense of it. You can see her and work out whether it’s some weird fantastical fallacy, or whether it’s the real deal. You can’t sit there going, ‘Ooh well, I don’t think that’s very nice.’ It’s has to be, ‘Well I don’t care. That’s what I do.’ And she seems to be cool with it.
In her shoes, we might be tempted to snap up a sugar daddy!
I think that happens a lot. Certainly some of the escorts I met when we were doing research told us that they meet guys called ‘lifetime sponsors.’ They’ll finance their entire life and occasionally they’ll have dinner with them or maybe have sex with them.
Belle gets together with her best friend, Ben, in this series. Have you ever done that in real life?
Yes, I did go out with a friend of mine. It didn’t last and we’re not friends anymore. It’s not a winning endorsement. It is quite muddy water, isn’t it? I only did it for a couple of years, but it’s what happens afterwards — the awkwardness and the breakdown of the circle of friends. That’s not something Ben and Hannah have a problem with though, because they don’t have a circle of friends. It’s just them, and it’s quite all-consuming. But I think one of you always loves the other more. Still holds a torch for them. It’s quite hard to let go and quite hard for it to be purely platonic with no sexual tension there.
It seems as though Stephanie’s daughter Poppy may turn into a bad girl in this series?
Yes, she’ll dance with the darkness. She’s a funny little character and I think Belle falls in love with her a bit. She doesn’t go gay for Poppy, she takes her under her wing. She’s a really nice character — someone being exposed to the whole world again through fresh eyes and being shocked and appalled. This is a young girl and it disgusts her and really breaks her heart that her mum should dabble in anything like that. It’s nice to see that side of it because otherwise it’s all singing and dancing.
Does Belle continue to run Stephanie’s business while Stephanie is in prison?
No, just until she gets out. You will see her again.
What can you tell us about Belle’s clients this series?
There’s a guy who likes to dress up like old horror movie characters. But the one that really got me was a guy who liked to dress up as a baby. Remember these are all based on true stories. It’s not really about sex — it’s about someone mothering them while they’re wearing a nappy, with a dummy and a bottle. There are even clubs where people can go dressed as babies and they all ‘goo’ and ‘ga.’
Have there ever been any dark corners of sexuality where you and the writers have thought it was too much to put into the show?
There have been moments where I’ve thought, ‘I don’t get that. I think it’s too far fetched.’ Then through research and talking about how we’re going about it, it’s become more palatable and not massively distasteful to watch. There are lots of discussions about how to address things that could be tricky, and just whether people can watch it. It doesn’t feel very ‘Page 3’ to me. It feels more heightened and taken slightly out of reality. And the sex is very funny as opposed to dirty and suggestive.
Is this the first project that you’ve worked on where you’ve also been the executive producer?
Yes, it’s more of a selfish thing of wanting to learn and cut my teeth in production. And I love the people I work with. I find it so much fun doing pre-production work with all the little teams and finding the right people for the job. It’s great and feels so brilliantly creative.
Is it true that you and your husband Laurence Fox didn’t discuss Belle to start with?
We do discuss it because I get really upset when people miss what it is and just write it off as being a silly, fluffy, light comedy, when it’s actually really dark. That makes me upset. So he has to talk me through all of that, and that’s when we talk about it mostly. He watched loads of it last year, but we don’t really sit down and watch things together. It’s certainly not a subject we can’t talk about.
Does the idea of working together appeal to you?
Yes, we want to, but I’m not sure if that would be acting together. He wants to do some directing, so maybe I could act in something he directs. That could be good — or it could be really bad [laughs]!
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