After 25 years in the limelight, the actor says she is finally finding her voice as an actor, writer and now director. Does life imitate art? The first thing Billie Piper says to me is, “It’s in your lined paper book, Eugene, I already sent it to them,” because she’s trying to home school her children while also roaming around her house to escape them and find a better phone signal. We’re already on to our third kind of tech in an attempt to video chat. “I’m just so strung out,” she says, sitting down, remarking that she looks awful with no makeup on, long blond hair yanked into a ponytail. She laughs at the bleakness: to hell with all this. The Piper household – her two sons, Winston, 12, and Eugene, eight, her musician boyfriend Johnny Lloyd and their toddler daughter, Tallulah – are enjoying the pandemic as little as the rest of us. “We’re OK. We’re just cracking on. Everyone’s going through it and other people have some terrible situations,” she says, first trying to be positive