The drama queen...
SHE’S THE WRITER BEHIND HIT SHOW Succession AND BILLIE PIPER’S LONG - AWAITED RETURN TO T V: MEET THE ACCL AIMED PL AY WRIGHT NOW DOMINATING OUR SCREENS
‘What would Shiv do?’ is the question Lucy Prebble finds herself asking multiple times a day. And it’s not because she, like the rest of us, is utterly in awe of Logan Roy’s gutsy only daughter in the (supposedly) Murdoch family-inspired hit show Succession. It’s because the 39-year-old is the writer and executive producer responsible for the series’ storylines and quick wit.
‘I’m really Shiv,’ Prebble admits. ‘I’m often the one pitching her emotional response to situations. Although everyone writes for everyone,’ she says of the 1O-strong writing team. Indeed, the epic line in season one – when Shiv’s fiancé Tom ‘swallows his own load’ on his stag do and says, ‘It’s not cheating because it’s all going back inside. It’s like a closed loop system’ – was Prebble.
When we talk, she fits me in between the final stages of writing season three of Succession and a gruelling schedule of edits for her newest show, I Hate Suzie. The eight-part series sees Prebble reunite with actor and best friend Billie Piper in a darkly funny drama exploring the emotional
” I’M NOT ONE OF THOSE WRITERS WHO WILL KNOCK
out a series on A CHANNEL’S REQUEST”
trauma that follows a hacked hard drive and leaked compromising photos. ‘When we did a TV show together the first time, we were not really in control of that process,’ Prebble says of 2OO7’s Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, of which she wrote the first two seasons. ‘We were young, wide-eyed and fed into a TV machine that told us what to do. Now, we are both in very different positions.’
Before TV, theatre put Prebble on the map. While studying English Literature at The University of Sheffield, she wrote scripts for actor friends who needed lines. After graduation, with a backup plan to train as a lawyer, Prebble moved to London, giving herself a year to ‘make an impact’ with her writing while working as a secretary at the National Theatre by day. Sure enough, her first play, The Sugar Syndrome, earned her an Olivier nomination. Onstage success has followed ever since, with ENRON, The Effect and, most recently, 2O19’s Alexander Litvinenko-inspired drama A Very Expensive Poison, which followed the Russian spy’s 2OO6 assassination and won her the Blackburn Prize, the world’s most prominent award for women playwrights.
Which medium does she enjoy more? ‘Television is a lot of people running around swearing and yelling, “We’re late!”’ she says. ‘I tend to prefer whichever I’m not working on at the time, so right now I am nostalgic about theatre.’ But the writing process for both? Torture. ‘I feel embarrassed at times. It’s so exposing. I always believe what I’ve written is total rubbish. I have to tell myself I’ll make it good later,’ she says. Her phone is filled with confusingly named voice notes of ideas she’s has had while travelling or halfasleep, which she writes from to avoid the dreaded blank page.
I Hate Suzie started from a conversation Prebble and Piper had about the darkest things they’d ever done, which led to the worst things they heard anybody else had ever done. ‘The stories used to make us laugh so hard because there’s a huge gap between the representation of women on screen and in real life.’ That’s why one of the episodes consists almost entirely of Suzie’s inner monologue while she masturbates. ‘Billie and I always ask ourselves: “What’s true in life that you never see [on screen]?”’
Next will be Succession’s third season, and then Hollywood awaits, with a horror film in the works. ‘I’ve been thinking about the transformative nature of women’s bodies,’ says Prebble. ‘And the idea of it turning into something awful, like in cult classics The Fly and An American Werewolf In London.’ Though not a fan of horror herself – she’s easily scared – it’s more a case of ‘if the genre fits’. ‘Film is where I want to be right now, which is counterintuitive given all the interest and money in TV,’ Prebble laughs. She finds going against trends appealing: ‘I’m not a writer who will knock out a sitcom on a channel’s request. I’m only interested in writing about topics I fiercely care about.’ So far, so (season one) Shiv. I Hate Suzie will premiere on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from October