Lucy Prebble interview: ‘There’s a difference between cancel culture and consequences for a---holes’

While working on the brilliantly toe-curling script for their new TV series, Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper kept a list called Things We Are Not Allowed to Say. It included, Prebble tells me now, thoughts that struck them as too extreme or indecent to use, “any story ideas which we thought we couldn’t possibly show – even if it was something we ourselves had done or thought, or we knew somebody who had done so.” Almost all of them ended up in the series.

I Hate Suzie centres on the fate of Suzie Pickles, a singer and actress (played by Piper) who won an X Factor-type contest aged 15. It opens 20 years later, by which time Pickles is an established star, with a husband, a son, and a house in the country. She has just landed the role of a lifetime as a Disney princess, when she becomes the target of an iCloud hack that sees some very compromising pictures of her appear on the internet – and her world unravels.

Everything about this series, from its alarming storyline and coruscating script to its in-your-face close-ups, has you not on the edge of your seat but trying to press yourself through the back of the sofa, both fascinated by and recoiling from its coke binge, mortifying magazine shoot, appalling Q and A session – and the sheer, raw emotion written all over the lovely face of Billie Piper.

When I tell Prebble how compulsively excruciating I found the first couple of episodes, she laughs. “Thank you! Please keep on watching – it gets a lot worse!” she says happily.  She and Piper are co-creators and executive producers. They are also close friends who have worked together before: Piper starred in Prebble’s 2007 ITV series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, and in her play The Effect at the National Theatre in 2012, which was written with Piper in mind.

With I Hate Suzie, “Billie said, we should create a show together which is exactly what we want to make,” Prebble tells me. “But I was slightly wary – because I didn’t want to do anything that might threaten our friendship. When it comes to work, I know what I like, and I can be quite strong-willed. But Billie is much braver than me, and she said [I was being] ridiculous.

“There’s so much television around – and storytelling generally – and reality has become so aggressive and loud that it’s quite difficult to create the emotional impact that might have happened more naturally 10 years ago. We wanted to make something where you are really inside somebody’s head – to go to intense emotional places quite quickly. Some people will respond to that and some people might find it a bit much.”

The plot was partly inspired by the 2014 iCloud attack in which almost 500 intimate photographs, mostly of celebrities, were hacked and disseminated through various websites. Prebble says she had been left wondering about the impact on the women in those pictures. “I’ve always been fascinated by technology – and it felt like a good metaphor for some of the stuff I wanted to write about generally – which is what it’s like if you’re a woman in your 30s living a life that doesn’t feel completely coherent. You’re different things to different people – and then something happens which means you can’t hide any more. You’re a victim of something terrible but what it unveils shows you in a poor light as well. I was interested in it being morally nuanced – I think we’re ready for that now in our representations of women on screen.”

She continues: “I actually think that one of the few ways that art can be useful at the moment, at a time of such political struggle, is in the restoration of nuance.” Prebble is adept at writing about strong but damaged women, women who are flawed and unpredictable. She and Piper worked together on the characters and the idea of each episode feeling tonally different. “Billie is obsessed with the emotional truth of something – she’s very good at reading a situation and saying, ‘I don’t buy that moment’ – and she’s always, always right.”

Prebble is also well-practised in the art of excruciation – she is one of the team of writers behind Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s wildly successful satirical HBO series about a vindictive media baron and the machinations of his grasping, grown-up children. “I love writing in a group because you’re always just pitching stuff to make it better,” she says. “So if someone is struggling with an episode, you’re all there to help.

“I’ve never worked with a bunch of people that I love and trust more than the Succession gang. We laugh so hard all the time, as we try to come up with something even more terrible for these terrible people to do to each other. “It reminds me a bit of theatre – the casts that really bond and have the best time are the ones that do the most dark and challenging work. If you want to meet an unhappy, bitchy cast, then go to a farce. Everyone acting in a farce just hates each other backstage.”

Prebble’s fascination with words began in childhood, when she would rewrite episodes of Star Trek for her own entertainment. It led her to study English literature at the University of Sheffield. She had intended to do a law conversion course afterwards, with a view to becoming a criminal barrister, but an early job at the National Theatre, as secretary to artistic director Nick Hytner, inspired a change of plan. “I lied about my typing speed to get it,” she says, “All I did was filing and bringing water into meetings, but I remember being faintly terrified that I might bring the water at the wrong moment.”

Her first play, The Sugar Syndrome (about an anorexic who befriends a paedophile), opened at the Royal Court Theatre in October 2003, but it was with Enron that she made her name six years later. A modern tragedy about capitalism and power, centred on the scandal at the American energy company, it opened in Chichester, before moving to the Royal Court then on to the West End, and Broadway (where it closed prematurely after a mean-spirited review in the New York Times).

Prebble followed it up with The Effect, about love, depression and neuroscience and then, last year, A Very Expensive Poison – a spectacular play about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian spy poisoned with polonium by a pair of inept assassins, Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitri Kovtun. She portrayed them as vaudevillian villains, as Putin heckled from a balcony, and Litvinenko presided over the stage from a hospital bed while solving his own murder. The result was not just a play but a show: bold, dynamic, funny but also extremely moving.

Prebble adopts a similarly playful approach to social media – “I will leave here the day that Woody Allen dies,” reads her Twitter bio – and refuses to take it too seriously. “When I first started using Twitter over 10 years ago, I was interested in it from a writing perspective and I used to tweet little fragments from a scene or a bad poem, or an attempt at a good poem, shards of ideas and voices and characters,” she says. “The idea interested me – what can you do in a deliberately fractured medium that you can’t do anywhere else?

“But as a medium it has largely become an exercise in self-creation and self-promotion, and I don’t tweet in the way that I used to because people might mistake it for a political opinion. I’m not interested in expressing my personal brand – whether it be politically or aesthetically, that’s not what turns me on.” She is unsympathetic towards the victims of a growing tendency for the online masses to call out prominent figures for the unsavoury views they have aired on social media, either recently or historically.

“Some people use and abuse platforms like Twitter to get attention and fame by saying things and then complaining that people are having a go at them – and about that I would simply say, there is a difference between cancel culture and consequences for a---holes.” Prebble’s projects invariably take a substantial amount of research and time to come to fruition.

She does endless drafts – Poison was two years in the writing, I Hate Suzie had a similar time frame – working in her office in Bermondsey, south London. I tell her I like to think of her sitting there in an extravagant dress and heels, creating something risky and dastardly.

“I wish!” she says. “It’s funny – I’ve got a few nice dresses and part of me is thinking, will we ever get to go out again or is life all tracksuit now? But I might well be inclined to dress ridiculously to write something soon – that’s where Covid madness is taking me.”

I Hate Suzie is on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from August 27