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[Klaus]

Billie Piper stars in a bold, bracing, Sky original drama about the moment in life when the mask slips, asking if any of us can survive being well and truly ‘known’. Suzie Pickles (Piper) has her life upended when she is hacked and pictures of her emerge in an extremely compromising position. The series shows her unravelling as the event ricochets around every area of her life. Episode by episode we follow her through the stages of shock, denial, fear, shame, bargaining, guilt, anger and acceptance as Suzie and her best friend and manager Naomi (Leila Farzad) try to hold her life, career and marriage to Cob (Daniel Ings) together.

Produced by Bad Wolf Limited, I Hate Suzie was commissioned by Zai Bennett, Managing Director of Content at Sky and Cameron Roach, Director of Drama, Sky Studios. Liz Lewin is the Commissioning Editor for Sky and the series is co-created and executive produced by Lucy Prebble and Billie Piper. Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter are executive producers.

In episode one, Piper’s anti-heroine Suzie Pickles – a former child star whose acting career is about to be boosted by a Disney role she thought she was too old for – gets lobbed one hell of a bombshell. Her phone’s been hacked and intimate photos of her performing a sex act are all over the Internet. Worse still: the man she’s pictured with isn’t her husband.

Even the smoothest celebrity operator would struggle to respond calmly and quickly to this humiliating situation, but Suzie Pickles definitely isn’t smooth. Played majestically by Piper, who doesn’t shy away from an extreme close-up that lets her show every iota of Suzie’s snowballing anxiety, she’s a selfish, impulsive and exasperating woman who presumably stopped acquiring self-awareness when she became famous. “She’s a nightmare,” says Prebble bluntly. “We really weren’t interested in making her ‘likeable’ in inverted commas, or even particularly relatable, because that’s something that’s been pushed down our throats when creating characters for a long time, especially when it comes to women.”

All episodes available on Sky/NOW TV now.