FALLOUT FROM A SEX ACT
Piper’sP stark look at modern life in ‘Suzie’
Billie Piper wants us to keep talking about sex.
More than a decade ago in England — where Piper admits they’re “very Victorian, even though they’re a filthy bunch themselves” — the actress teamed up with playwright Lucy Prebble to make “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” the raunchy, rebellious show about a high-end escort and the men who paid her. The show celebrated sex and sex work and sex workers, a concept barely more revolutionary in 2007 than it is in 2020.
Now, she and Prebble have reunited for “I Hate Suzie,” a darker, more intentional investigation of intimacy.
The HBO Max series, premiering Thursday, follows a former child pop star whose life is thrown upside down when a compromising photo of her is stolen and leaked online. Each of the eight episodes correlates to a stage of grief: shock, denial, fear, shame, bargaining, guilt, anger and acceptance.
The photo, of the eponymous Suzie Pickles performing oral sex on an unidentified man, ruins everyone. Her husband hates her for cheating. Her manager and best friend is woefully unequipped to fix any of it. And Suzie, trying to be a wife, mother and working woman, spirals as a private moment of her life is plastered across the internet and England’s slimiest tabloids for all to see.
“When Lucy and I entered our 30s, we both went through quite a lot, for different reasons, but what I would call a common crisis,” Piper, 38, told the Daily News.
“We just wanted to dramatize those years of our lives. They’re not autobiographical, but the fallout and the state of those years was something we felt quite compelled to flesh oout in a way that felt very very real, true and without sparing aanything.”
“I Hate Suzie” certainly doesn’t spare anything. Like “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” it doesn’t shy away from graphic realities, both emotional and physical.
“It’s quite vulgar at times,” Piper told The News. “All the characters aren’t always likable. It’s not deliberately there to shock, but it is genuine.”
In the writers room, Piper said, they came up with a list of topics that “people either wouldn’t believe it or would find...too horrifying.” Most of those ended up in the show: a man masturbating on public transit, a woman masturbating in the privacy of her own home, slut-shaming.
In “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” a sex worker finds her voice. In “I Hate Suzie” a woman’s voice is stolen.
“It was important to show the state of her marriage and also to show what happens to women when they are seen to deviate from the appropriate tracks. A woman being unfaithful, deceitful, has, I think, a more profound impact on her life than if a man was caught cheating on his wife. There is an expectation of women,” Piper told The News.