Piper dreams

Billie Piper. Photo / Supplied

The first time I met Billie Piper, I was left feeling that I owed her an apology. She was heavily pregnant at the time - to husband actor Laurence Fox - we got chatting about her birth options and I was perhaps a little too candid about what scenarios she might encounter, resulting in my glancing up at one point to be met with her huge caramel eyes, wide with trepidation.

Very bad form on my part: it really isn't on to scare first-time mums-to-be.

What made it worse was that Piper had been great company - bright, open, witty, with a well-developed sense of the absurd - whether talking about her recent marriage to Fox, her first one to British DJ Chris Evans, her teenage pop career, playing Rose in Doctor Who, or the furore over her role as Belle de Jour in Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

In the end, the guilt got too much and I sent an apology via her publicist. In October 2008 Piper had her baby, Winston James, after a 26-hour labour, followed by an emergency Caesarean. It all sounds pretty gruelling.

"When the contractions first started I laughed, because I couldn't believe how painful it was," says Piper when we meet again. "But we stopped off at Starbucks on the way to the hospital for a triple shot and a muffin before it all kicked off."

She is full-on glamorous, in a slinky dress, when I first see her having her photograph taken, and afterwards the 27-year-old changes into jeans and a zipped top.

Petite, hair swept back from tawny skin, she looks both chic and staggeringly young and vulnerable. We find a quiet place to talk, Piper grabbing a late lunch as she tells me about the birth, which involved "lots of drugs" and a period where she was sick.

"I think that might have been the gas and air, which I abused in a quite unnecessary fashion." The Caesarean wasn't planned. "I think they got panicked because [the baby] was distressed, and they were worried about him losing oxygen to his brain. I was like, 'cut him out now!"'

The Caesarean felt "surreal, nightmarish ... It felt like he was actually attached, part of me somehow, as if he didn't want to move away." She pauses, thoughtful.

Childbirth is one of those situations where it's "do or die", isn't it? "Absolutely. You can't go back. The stakes are really high and you feel this enormous pressure to do well for your baby." Breastfeeding was relatively simple.

"The state of my boobs, just the veins, it was laughable; I was amazed they could get that big. Now they look like envelopes - gross. Winston doesn't even recognise them. He's ... [she strikes a contemptuous pose] 'you're nothing to me'."

A media fuss ensued when Fox mentioned that initially he found new fatherhood difficult, saying: "I definitely went through odd feelings, really animal ones, such as, 'do I even want this baby?"'

Is it that these days new mothers can admit to feeling inadequate or ambivalent, but new fathers aren't allowed? Piper nods. "It's like, if it's not all roses and you're trying to have an honest conversation about the fact it's hard and exhausting, it causes this uproar.

Suddenly Laurence is being asked to go on chat shows as spokesperson for Sad Dads." Did the reaction upset him? "I suppose. He's thinking, 'I don't want my son to find out that I was saying how much he ruined my life!'

He's a sensitive guy, Laurence. Thoughtful and emotional." Is he a good dad? "He's a great dad." Are you a good mum? "I think so: I love my son, and I care about him. I want to make him happy, and have good times together and ... I don't know what else I can do."

There was more interest when Chris Evans showed up at the hospital just after Winston was born.

Piper and Evans had a famously amicable divorce and remain great friends. However, the way the reporting goes, sometimes you'd think she and Evans were still "the couple", with Fox and Evans' new wife, Natasha, sidelined. "Most relationships would struggle with that," concedes Piper.

Even so, she thinks it's a bit odd if people think she and Evans are secretly obsessed with each other, while going to the lengths of getting married and having children with other people. "I think that what happens is very simple acts of friendship get framed in a certain way," she says.

"Chris has been such a big part of my life that he's always there when the big things happen, but that might make everything look more full-on than our relationship actually is. I barely see Chris now but, of course, he brings a card to congratulate us. That doesn't mean he's coming around every Saturday morning with baked goods, massaging my feet, as my husband sits next to me. He wasn't there at the birth, encouraging Laurence to encourage me."

How would she feel if it were the other way around? "I'd be furious! I'm a jealous partner. You're entering serious bunny-boiler territory when Laurence even has to hold hands with a girl he's working with. Laurence is just far more relaxed, so much cooler than I am about that kind of thing - it's a testament to who he is really."

Piper says she and Fox aimed for the "thespian couple" ideal of only one person working at a time. "But we've failed at that already - we're so selfish, we couldn't even make a year." Fox was busy with Lewis, and Piper was contractually obliged to film the third series of Call Girl.

Nevertheless, Piper feels that this may be her final series of Call Girl. Pregnant for the second series, she hadn't been able to take her clothes off. "So this time, it's gone sex-crazy. They're like, this time, she'll work - that bitch will wish she never got pregnant at all!"

Joking apart, Piper found the sex scenes difficult. "I suppose because I'm a mum now. I'm aware of the fact that you have a child, yet here you are again, with another actor, pretending to be prostitute."

She was relieved that Winston was weaned before shooting started. "Imagine if I'd been a lactating prostitute - expressing between takes. How shocking would that be?" "I'm not shy of a sex scene," says Piper, "but these scenes are really exposing. There was one where I had to make animal noises.

And there is a part of me that thinks: 'I have to go home and feed my son now, and I'm going to need several showers before that. And a lot of praying'." She laughs, placing her face in her hands. "I just hope I raise my son as someone who's really open-minded. And forgiving. 'Forgive me son, for I have sinned'." Piper isn't wrong about there being a lot more sex in this series.

However, there's a lot more characterisation and plotting, too - Call Girl hitting its stride as a camp, sleek blend of comedy-drama, and Belle as a modern-day Moll Flanders. There is no pretence at "gritty reality", or of being representative of the average prostitute's life.

Even so, Call Girl has always been a controversial series, with many accusations of "glamorising prostitution".

Piper, in particular, took a lot of flak. She says now that she was mainly offended by the inference that, beneath the basques and the jacuzzi bubbles, the real-life Belle was a victim. "She just wasn't. And we told it how she told it. It's not like we made her story glamorous and fluffy. She found it exciting and thrilling - very different to what other prostitutes are exposed to."

Only recently, the real "Belle", Bristol University research scientist Brooke Magnanti, 34, went public with her identity. Piper had already met Magnanti, and is now planning to meet her again, though doesn't know what to expect.

"The last time, it was so covert, tense-making - it's weird being around someone who's hiding such a massive part of her life. I do wonder how much that secret defined who she is, and now that it's out there, whether she feels a sense of loss." She sounds quite protective of her.

"I suppose I am. I wonder how it must be for her to now walk into a room and everyone knows [she's] a whore." One couldn't help but notice that when Magnanti first went public, she attracted much less hostility for actually being Belle than Piper did for portraying her - what was all that about? "I was her windbreak?" shrugs Piper.

Certainly Magnanti should be grateful to her screen alter ego for deflecting most of the criticism. Magnanti said in an interview that sometimes she misses her life as a prostitute. "I can relate to that," says Piper, "in the sense that I miss acting when I'm not doing it - just because it's fun, eventful and strange. She may have enjoyed her line of work for the same reason - dominating men, pleasing men, being the centre of attention ... I imagine it can all get quite addictive."

Call Girl has been good for Piper, though typecasting may be turning into an issue. Since having her baby, she has also starred in a film. "Don't laugh when I tell you what it's called - A Passionate Woman. And yes, there are sex scenes." There seems to be a bit of a theme emerging here. "That's what my husband said. He said, 'some day you're going to have to rein it in'."

It turns out that A Passionate Woman is a serious drama, written by British actor and director Kay Mellor about her mother falling in love with a Polish worker in the 1960s. However, Piper says she does get sent "certain" kinds of scripts. "They say things like [deadpan], 'a nurse is at the sink, cleaning. With her tits out.' Or, 'a secretary arrives at the office. With no clothes on whatsoever. Groping herself."'

Piper peals with laughter. Why wasn't she the first female Doctor Who? (David Tennant recently named her as his favourite assistant). Piper says she was aware that there was speculation, but she knows and respects the new doctor, Matt Smith. "And Doctor Who should be a man. It's a guy's job."

In any case, she doesn't feel that she could take on something like that right now. "With Doctor Who, there's nine months' filming in Wales, and it's full-on. You really have to give it your life, and it can get quite suffocating. I loved the show and I'm grateful to it, but you take on a lot more than a role, just because of the obsession with it."

So what are Piper's plans? She and Fox now have a place in London as well as a cottage in West Sussex. Piper was, as she puts it, "the first domino to fall" in her group of friends, where having a baby is concerned. As for work, she feels "sated, for now".

However, like many new mothers, she feels "torn" about what to do next. On the one hand, she has more than proved she can act, with roles ranging from Belle and Rose to Shakespeare's Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, and Fanny Price in Mansfield Park.

Piper is emerging as a mercurial actress, hard to pin down on the cultural compass, which is a good thing. Moreover, the last time we met, she told me about how, even as a child growing up in Swindon, she was "freakishly ambitious" and couldn't wait to be an adult with a career and her own flat.

However, with Winston's birth, Piper feels as though she has entered a period of re-evaluation. "I have accepted now, which is quite a hard thing to do, that your career choices are going to be dictated by your family. You can't just go off and do certain things any more, you can't be as wild and free-spirited. I accept that there are certain things professionally I can't really do now. Once you get over that, it's quite liberating actually."

Liberating? "Yes. Sometimes with work, it's this thing of: what is going to define me with my career, what am I searching for? Sometimes it's as if you don't know where to stop. What would it take to make you feel whole? It's this hungry quest actors have, this thing of, 'I'm not successful until I'm a huge star in America'."

Does she fancy that? "I definitely used to," says Piper. However, she knows this would entail not only the hard work, but also decamping to the US, disrupting her new family. "And, if I did go, then what? Go around selling myself to people, and spend my days sitting by a pool with my baby, saying: 'I've got a meeting next week?"'

At the same time, Piper says that having a child has helped her acting; it has given her more confidence and a sense of perspective about going up for parts.

"Now when I have auditions, I'm not half as nervous as I used to be." She also likes working, and feels she needs it - "for focus, discipline, and structure, more than anything else". She shakes her head: "It's really hard to know what the right thing to do is. You want to satisfy your family, your husband and your child. But you selfishly want to satisfy yourself, too."

So perhaps Piper should go and sit by the pool, see what happens, have her shot. "I definitely don't want to be super-famous - having done the singing stuff young, it taught me that the fame element is always the least interesting part of our job." That seems a very useful lesson to learn young.

"Exactly. What I really want is to do work that's inspiring, interesting and insightful, and to be working with great people - but that can happen here." In many ways, Piper must feel as if she is just coming up for air. "There has been a lot going on," she says. "And I've learned a lot. Sometimes it's been really hard - you can't be as reckless, you have to be so much more responsible." Saying that, Piper does feel happier.

"You can't help being happier. Just because you have this new, amazing creation in your life. Just one smile will last you half a day. I definitely feel more complete as a person."

* Secret Diary of a Call Girl screens on Prime, March 10 at 9.30pm

- OBSERVER.