Billie Piper: Boozing with Chris Evans rescued me
BILLIE PIPER says boozy nights with Chris Evans helped her to overcome her teenage eating disorder.
The star, who topped the charts at 15, said the anorexia she had at the time ‘was a reaction to the chaos’ of fame and a punishing schedule of working up to 19 hours a day.
But she tells today’s Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 that she found ‘love and support’ with Mr Evans, who is 17 years her senior, and they enjoyed partying.
‘People looked upon that as me rebelling and falling apart. I’d stopped caring about how I looked, I’d put on loads of weight and was in pubs all the time,’ says the 38-year-old.
‘But that wasn’t my experience. My experience of that time was I needed that. That felt like my sort of formative uni years. I felt loved and supported and we had a great time.’
The couple, who married in 2001 and divorced six years later, remain friends. The mother-of-three may be one of the UK’s most in-demand actresses, but says: ‘I think fame is my least favourite thing about what I do. I really just find it quite repellent.’ She says she quit her initial stint as Rose Tyler in Dr Who in 2006 due to the pressure of being back in the public eye, adding: ‘It was great in many ways… But it made me really famous again in that sort of mainstream fame way that I find really uncomfortable. I loved that show. I loved Rose Tyler… I didn’t like the responsibility of being a sort of role model.’
Other screen credits include Secret Diary Of A Call Girl and I Hate Suzie, but she is still ‘haunted’ by dropping a baby Jesus doll in her first performance on stage as Mary in a school nativity play. ‘I get nervous still before I go on stage,’ she says. ‘I go into an almost out-of-body experience, a sort of blackout.’
• Desert Island Discs is on today at 11am, and will be repeated on Friday at 9am.