The second season of dark comedy series I Hate Suzie, called I Hate Suzie Too, starts tonight (20th December) on Sky Atlantic and NOW, and it sees Billie Piper’s Suzie Pickles taking part in a popular dance reality competition show, Dance Crazee.
In the opening moments of the new season, Suzie performs a dance on the show where she is dressed as a clown, in which she appears almost crazed and distressed at times. It does not go down well with the viewers and she receives the lowest score of the night.
RadioTimes.com caught up exclusively with Piper and the series’s co-creator and writer Lucy Prebble, to break down this unsettling scene.
Piper said of Suzie’s thinking in this moment: “She really wants to shirk this sexual, slut shaming image that we saw a lot in the first season. And sometimes the best way to do that is to completely mask yourself. And de-sexualize yourself and somehow make yourself as inaccessible as possible. And so the makeup, the costume just felt like a great way to do that.”
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Piper continued: “And her ambition [is] that, ‘Oh, they’ll like this, they’ll really dig this because it’s alternative, it’s fun, it’s a side of me that people haven’t seen before, I can be silly and things,’ and actually the audience receive it as, ‘You’re being pretentious, you’re unreadable. It’s cold, and women shouldn’t be clowns.’”
Meanwhile, Prebble added: “Formally, thematically, there was an interesting thing about the internal and the external. One of the big themes is on stage and off stage [is], like, ‘Who are you with the smile and the makeup? And who are you actually underneath that, who isn’t smiling?’
“And so I think that first dance, we were moving between the external experience of her being very colourful, and trying to people please and do the splits and be a good dancer, and her internal of ‘S**t, what’s the next move? 123? Okay, what do I need to do next?’”
Piper also said the dance was showing what Suzie “thinks about herself”. “Which is, ‘I’m sort of like a monster in these moments.’ It’s her shadow self.”
Piper previously said that this season’s dance element was added in part because she wanted to dance, adding: “What’s good about doing [I Hate Suzie] is that it feels like I’m getting to do Strictly without having to do it.”
Additional reporting by Abby Robinson.
I Hate Suzie Too is coming to Sky and NOW on 20th December 2022. Find out more about how to sign up for Sky TV here.
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