Billie Piper: ‘I felt like a salesperson for other people’s music as a pop star’
Billie Piper has said she felt like a “charlatan” when she was a pop star in her teens.
She toldbbcradio4’ s desert Island Discs programme that acting was always her passion and she felt she had limited musical abilities.
Piper, 38, who now works as an actress, shot to fame in her teenage years with hits including Because We Want To, and lived in London away from her parents for several years before turning 18.
She told presenter Lauren Laverne she felt like a “salesperson for other people’s music”.
“I always felt like a charlatan because I loved singing but I didn’t have the strongest voice, I didn’t write songs, I didn’t play or write music,” she added. “Acting was what I wanted to do most and on some level I was acting my way through it because it became too hard to uphold.”
She said being cast in Doctor Who as Rose Tyler was “great in many ways because I was doing what I felt like I was born to do on some level”.
The actress joined the programme in 2005 as the Time Lord’s companion when the show was rebooted.
“It was a very exciting and satisfying time because it was hard to get an acting job with my history, first as a pop star then as this sort of burnt-out child star, which is how I think I was painted,” Piper said.
She added she thinks that perception of her persisted until “quite recently”.
The actress, who is from Swindon, said she was “desperate” to get out of the “small town environment” when she was younger. She added: “I didn’t want to just leave all my ambitions and desires at the door to sort of raise kids and serve men.”
Piper also said: “I had a lot of fire in my belly as a kid about things I wanted to do, about things I loved and things I wanted to pursue and my mum, I feel like she was always amazed by that and my dad would champion it all the way.”
Piper has two sons with her ex-husband, actor Laurence Fox. She is also mother to Tallulah, with her partner Johnny Lloyd, the former singer for rock band Tribes.