Entertainment
Billie Piper left raging by Framing Britney Spears: ‘You’re not born crazy’
Billie Piper has revealed she was left so angry by the Framing Britney Spears documentary she was unable to finish it.
The groundbreaking documentary took a look at the ongoing story of Britney Spears’s controversial conservatorship, which she’s been under since 2008, and the Free Britney movement that is aiming to release the superstar from the constraints of it.
While Billie concedes she was ‘quite locally famous’, having risen to fame as a teen pop star around the same time Britney did in the US, the wider conversation around being ‘hung out to try’ as a female left her reeling.
Speaking to NME, Billie said she ‘really felt’ the elements in the film that focused on Britney being expected to be simultaneously virginal and sexual, but when it came to mental health, that was another game.
She said this week: ‘[The film] made me so angry that I had to turn it off. I know what a lot of that feels like, but she had it on a whole different level. She was world famous, whereas I was quite locally famous.’
Billie added: ‘It makes me really angry, because a lot of that isn’t what it’s like to be a famous person, it’s what it feels like to be female and be called mad because you’re driven mad by something.
‘You’re not born crazy. You’re driven mad by certain things. Then you’re used and hung out to dry.
‘That’s what made me feel cross and sad.’
With the release of her recent project Rare Beasts, Billie has been opening up more about her time as a teen popstar after she was catapulted into the limelight aged 15 with hit Because We Want To.
The tune made her the youngest female artist to debut at the top of the singles chart, however Billie recently described her teenage years as a chart-topping singer as ‘unbelievably unsafe’ and ‘lonely’.
Speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Billie said: ‘When I look back at it now I have my own children, it seems unbelievably unsafe.
‘It felt desperate and lonely.’
Billie, who has since become a successful and acclaimed actor on both stage and screen, described feeling like a ‘charlatan’ during her early career, and like a ‘salesperson for other people’s music’.
She explained: ‘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.
‘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.’
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