Succession writer Lucy Prebble on friendship, breakups and why she won’t pull any punches writing female characters
Lucy Prebble likes to hide in plain sight.
hen she first became friends with Billie Piper, in the early 2000s, the paparazzi were still hounding the singer, who by then had already conquered the pop charts and married DJ Chris Evans.
In press pictures, Prebble was often there “somewhere in the background, slightly out of focus, with a silly expression on my face. Nobody was interested in me”.
Twenty years later, Billie is still a star – if not quite the same order of paparazzi quarry – and Prebble has become one of the most important TV writers of her generation: her credits include Succession.
The two women are close friends and have co-created another of the cleverest series of the last few years, I Hate Suzie.
But Billie is still the showman out front and Prebble tells me “there’s a sense I’m still hiding. I have to admit how comfortable I find it to be hidden behind someone, because I feel it’s a safer place to be. There’s an egotism to writing, but also a cowardice”.
All of this is interesting because while the jumping off point for the series was taken from the headlines – the photo hack scandals in which many female stars had their devices accessed and comprising pictures released against their will – the consequences for the characters draw on Prebble and Piper’s own lived experience and the honesty that comes from two old mates bouncing ideas off each other.
I Hate Suzie deals with a former child star – not unlike Billie herself – who, just as she finds she has been cast as the new Disney princess, learns that photos of her having sex with a man who is not her husband have been leaked online.
Her career is decimated, her marriage destroyed, and the second season (I Hate Suzie Too) shows how the fallout plays out, as Suzie debases herself with reality TV opportunities and tries to navigate a vicious custody battle, in which her recreational drug use is held against her.
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Billie Piper in Pebble’s creation ‘I Hate Suzie’
Billie plays the central character with the ragged urgency of a hunted animal; tremulous glances and rictus grins giving way to jags of despair and boltholes of chemical-induced euphoria.
Many television writers of the last 20 years have seemed to pull their punches in making their female protagonists truly flawed, Prebble points out. “It was very important to me not to do that.”
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The visceral messiness of Suzie’s broken marriage is perhaps an even more central part of the new series than her attempt at a career comeback.
Says Prebble: “The way that you ‘other’ the other person [in a relationship breakup] and monster them is something I really wanted to talk about, because that’s something that frightens me. One’s capacity to go from loving somebody to sort of needing to hate them quite quickly.”
Prebble has been through her own difficult breakup in the last few years.
“It was a long and very meaningful relationship and that ended and that was very difficult,” she admits.
“But it’s not uncommon. It’s weird, isn’t it, how stuff that’s so painful is so normal. It’s hard. It’s like a death. You think, ‘This thing is so bad, it should happen to one in a hundred people, but no, it’s the same thing that happens to everyone.’”
She described herself in psychological language as “quite an avoidant person. When I do those romantic relationship tests, I come up as highly avoidant. I think one of the reasons it’s been harder for me in relationships is that maybe I’m probably a tricky partner in some ways”.
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Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble attend the Writers Guild Of Great Britain Awards, 2022. Picture by by David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
Getting over it, “has been a process, and it takes time. I will say that I have found solace in work. Making this show [I Hate Suzie Too] has been distracting and cathartic.
“And Succession was something which felt like being surrounded by a supportive family. They caught me and I’ll always be grateful for that”.
Jesse Armstrong’s groundbreaking series about the wrangling for power at the heart of a media dynasty seemed to touch a cultural nerve when it first appeared 2018. Prebble was the sole writer on an episode in the first season – the one in which patriarch Logan Roy attempts to repair his image by having a stage-managed get-together at the family ranch – and she co-wrote many more.
She also worked on the forthcoming fourth series, and as with I Hate Suzie, it may have represented a healthy expression of difficult emotions behind the scenes. “In this season [of Succession], there’s an argument that takes place at one point and there are a few lines where I was really able to express stuff in a way I would never say in my real life, because I don’t want to be that much of a d**k.
“I think that’s something special about Succession generally. It’s no coincidence that the men who work on it are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life and then they write this absolute vitriol. It’s so interesting.”
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A scene from HBO’s ‘Succession’ S3
Over the last few years, the show has sparked a slew of copycats which take as their subject the foibles of the super rich (The White Lotus and recent Cannes winner, Triangle of Sadness, trail in Succession’s wake).
Prebble says she has not been entirely comfortable with this strange mixture of fetishisation and skewering of the ultra wealthy. Satire should have a consequence, she tells me.
“You’ve now got this situation where, in the era of social media and reality TV, a lot of people have a sort of fame. But still, only a few people will have access to great wealth.
“We’re noticing wealth very much now, and we’re showing it and attacking it. But in the real world inequality is not changing, it’s getting worse.”
Prebble comes from a middle-class background. She grew up with an older sister and brother in Haslemere Surrey in a “rural suburban” area, “quite out in the sticks”. School was two trains away and Prebble lacked friends.
“Books were my escape. My mother was a huge reader and I devoured anything from the library.”
Her father worked in IT so there were computers in the house. As a kid, she had different personae online. “That made me feel powerful when I wasn’t powerful. Being able to be whoever you wanted to be and turn it on and off at will.”
She also used a tape recorder owned by her father to record American sitcoms like Cheers and the Golden Girls and would listen to the dialogue in bed, fascinated with its cadences.
She did well at school but hated the regimentation of it and struggled with her mental health.
“I was not happy. There are a lot of pained diaries, which I still have. [Reading them] I would say I was probably depressed for a while.”
In 1980s Britain, there wasn’t much help for these kinds of issues in children. “It’s only now, looking back, that I think, ‘Oh you had a lot of very dark, violent thoughts’. But I wasn’t sharing them. I was writing them down. Maybe there’s some relationship between all of that and reaching out to people through the internet.”
She became involved in theatre while studying English at Sheffield University; she won the Most Promising Playwright award at the National Student Drama Festival in 2002, and an internship at London’s Bush Theatre.
There was this unspoken thing that our culture was gobbling up some of the most politically aware and intelligent people I knew
She never thought she could make a living at being a playwright, however, until she began doing secretarial work at the National Theatre in London. There she saw plays that were not ready to be performed.
“That showed me that some things are not that good when they start out. It gave me confidence to have a go.”
Her first play, The Sugar Syndrome, was about paedophile chat rooms and she followed that up with Secret Diary of a Call Girl, an adaptation of a blog – her first collaboration with Piper. After that she wrote Enron, a critically successful play based on the financial scandal and collapse of the American energy corporation. It won her an Olivier award.
“This is the early 2000s, and I knew a lot of people who went into it from university who had just gotten on that graduate treadmill. Nobody ever questioned that path or even asked what, say, PricewaterhouseCoopers does. It didn’t matter. It was just, ‘Just get on the thing and do the scheme.’
“There was this unspoken thing that our culture was gobbling up some of the most politically aware and intelligent people I knew and I felt nobody had described that meaningfully.”
Even with this early success, she struggled with her creative confidence.
“The flaw in my writing was that it tended to be over-explicatory. I had such shame around that. It all felt so finger waggy and needy and too clear. I was so jealous of writers who could write pieces where nothing happens onstage for 20 minutes and nobody in the play is articulate.”
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Lucy Prebble, playwright and screenwriter, photographed at the Soho Hotel, London. Picture by Sam Pearce
In the rest of her life, she says she “didn’t really have a clue who I was until my mid-30s [she’s 41 now]. Maybe I was a bit lost or inauthentic. I think it took me that long to sort of wake up and take responsibility, personality-wise. I started from a point of ‘what’s the right thing to do, what would people like me to write’ and that’s a very dangerous way to build a sense of self”.
This need to please even had an impact on her personal life.
“Let’s say someone asks you out on a date and you go, ‘Oh, I don’t want to hurt their feelings. I’ll go out on a date with them’. It’s a terrible place to start.”
Given that her work brought her into contact with many well-known people, and that one of the central themes of I Hate Suzie is the relationship between the star and her long-suffering friend/agent (a wonderfully weary Leila Farzad), I wonder if Prebble has ever struggled with being honest with celebrities.
“Not with actors. But I have experienced it more with musicians. They do whatever they want all day and then have thousands of people going ‘you’re amazing’. That sends you potty.
“I think that sort of person can become very difficult to have a real conversation with. But that’s not true with myself and Billie. Our relationship is defined by being brutally honest with each other.”
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Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble at the Writers Guild Of Great Britain Awards, 2022 in London. Picture by David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
That honesty shines through the writing of I Hate Suzie Too. There is a line in it when Suzie’s sometime agent wonders, “Why do women hate women so much? We’re also stupid, venal bitches.”
When I mention it to Prebble, she says: “ I think we’re at a point, artistically, where we can dissect femininity in the same way that art has dissected masculinity for so long. The tropes of it, the traction of it, the way Scorsese looked at masculinity and all its flaws in his movies.
“We should be at a point where we should not just nod toward that approach as women but really go for it”.
The show has challenged her sense of safety and her urge to hide. On Succession “there’s a protective buffer of someone [Jesse Armstrong] I really respect being in charge and that really appeals to the childlike part of me that wants to do good work and be protected”. On I Hate Suzie by contrast, “the buck stops with me. It’s like riding a motorbike at 100 miles per hour all the time”.
And, as anyone who watches it will see, it’s a wild ride.
Sky Original’s ‘I Hate Suzie Too’ is on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from December 20. ‘Succession’ season four is due in spring
https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/television/succession-writer-lucy-prebble-on-friendship-breakups-and-why-she-wont-pull-any-punches-writing-female-characters-42225911.html Succession writer Lucy Prebble on friendship, breakups and why she won’t pull any punches writing female characters