BILLIE PIPER
HUBBY NO2 With Fox in 2014. Right, in 2015
IN his latest rant about climate change, culture warrior Laurence Fox yesterday urged his followers to “put a middle finger up to the scam net zero doomsday cultists”.
It is precisely the kind of comment his ex-wife Billie Piper tries to stop the two sons she had with Fox during their nine-year marriage from seeing.
In an interview with Vogue, the actress, 41, admits she has handled co-parenting with Fox with “extreme difficulty”, and tries to stop the controversies around him affecting their kids, 15-year-old Winston and 11-year-old Eugene.
She told the magazine: “I close everything down and keep a very strict routine with the kids so that there’s consistency.
“I keep them close. That’s all I can do.
“I try to keep people from telling me stuff, but it’s really, really hard. I don’t read it, but everyone wants to talk about it. Sometimes I have to say to people, ‘Please don’t bring this to me, now or ever’.”
Her ex – best known for playing James Hathaway in Lewis from 2006 to 2015 – has been up to his neck in controversy since January 2020, when he appeared on Question Time and accused an audience member who called him a “white privileged male” of being a racist. He claimed it got him cancelled from a 21year acting career.
He also got cancelled by GB News in September after making misogynistic comments about political journalist Ava Evans, telling host Dan Wootton no “self-respecting man” would
“climb into bed” with her. Ofcom this month ruled the comments were degrading and demeaning both to Ms Evans and women generally.
Following the ruling, Fox tweeted that he “could have expressed myself better, that’s life and I’ve said my bit”.
He was married to Billie from 2007 until 2016, and his ex wife told Vogue that coping with his crusade against “woke” had “made me feel stronger”.
She said: “I’ve learnt I have a lot of resilience I didn’t know I had. I’ve had to learn the hard way that you can only control yourself and how you react to things. It’s really f***ing hard.”
She said “a divorce speaks for itself ” and added that Fox’s family, including his sister Lydia and her husband, the comic Richard Ayoade, “might have a more interesting take” on him.
Billie met Fox in a theatre rehearsal room in 2006 and they wed the next year, after her divorce from first husband DJ Chris Evans, who she wed in 2001 when she was 18 and he was 35. She does not have a bad word to say about her first husband.
She said: “I consider him one of the good guys.
“Sure, people would shout things about the age gap at us in the street. Street trolling... I mean it was pretty terrifying. People still ask me about it at parties. Strangers. It was 20 years ago.
“It makes slightly more sense to constantly be asked about husband number two, but even then I resent that because we’ve been separated for almost 10 years.”
She is now in a relationship with Tribes lead singer Johnny Lloyd, with whom she has a daughter, Tallulah.
Fox, 45, who founded the right-wing Reclaim Party in 2020, has accused Billie of using their sons as weapons, claiming he had been denied access. In 2022, he alleged that he was not able to see or speak to their eldest son Winston on his 14th birthday.
Billie said keeping a sense of humour about her ex helped her. She said: “You have to laugh because it’s a lot. It’s a good way of kind of soothing yourself.” The actress plays Newsnight booker Sam Mcalister in the upcoming Netflix film Scoop, about Prince Andrew’s car crash interview in which he denies he had sex with a 17-year-old girl trafficked by his friend, the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Asked her thoughts on the Royal Family, Billie told Vogue: “I have strong feelings about some of the things that have happened in the last few years.”
See the full feature in April’s British Vogue, available via digital download and on newsstands from Tuesday.
I learned the hard way that you can only control yourself
BILLIE PIPER ON EX FOX & HIS CONTROVERSIAL VIEWS