Billie Piper: How the former child star became a vital voice of messiness and rage

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse Loughrey Get our The Life Cinematic email for free Get our The Life Cinematic email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Because Billie Piper’s debut hit “Because We Want To” came out more than two decades ago in 1998, it is easy to forget exactly how its music video starts: with Piper, then 15 and dressed in baggy purple velvet, being beamed down from a spaceship. What The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum once characterised as Piper’s “smashed-doll features”, perfectly imperfect in their scale and malleability, lend themselves to the portrayal of a very particular kind of woman – one who physically embodies an ideal, but is too complex to idealise. open image in gallery Startlingly cruel: Piper and Theo Woolf in ‘Rare Beasts’ Its best scenes are the ones that feel like the truest, most crystalline distillations of its writer-director-actor’s sensibility, melding sexual humiliation with an observation about the complexities of modern feminism, as when Mandy first undresses for an undeserving Pete: “I want to unveil myself to you one piece at a time, so that I can get used to you seeing me naked and so I can talk you through about what I physically hate about myself,” she tells him, itemising her various flaws and waiting for him to agree as she peels off her various layers, before finally bending over. I mean, me – do you like me?” In addition to being a darkly funny burlesque about the discomfort inherent in being a self-critical woman getting naked for the first time with a stranger, it is also an effective way for Piper to remind us just how many strangers she has metaphorically exposed herself to in the last 23 years, hearing every insecurity she might have felt parroted back at her a hundredfold.