Chris Evans shared the moment he thought his relationship with ex-wife Billie Piper was ‘getting a bit weird’ and realised it was over.
Evans first met the teenaged singer when she appeared on his show TFI Friday back in 2000, and they began dating a short while after.
In 2001, the couple got hitched in Las Vegas. Piper was just 18-years-old at the time, while the radio presenter was 35.
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The pair split in 2004, when Piper was 21, and divorced in 2007 - but remain friends.
During an appearance on RTÉ One’s The Late Late Show back in 2009, Evans opened up about his relationship with the singer and actor.
He said: “Bill was in a similar situation to me, she was apparently successful but completely lonely - it’s very hard for people to understand, you have all this success, you have a great life, you have all these opportunities, you have a few quid and yet you find yourself in disarray. That does happen sometimes.
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“We found each other and helped each other out.”
Evans said the pair had never intended to get married, but had done so ‘because they could’ while living out in Los Angeles.
It was around this time, that his new-wife then got back into acting, pointing out that prior to her pop career she had ‘always’ been an actor.
The couple returned to the UK after Evans was required to sign off on the building work on his home in Surrey and decided to stick around.
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He went on: “And then Bill got the job in Doctor Who and then she started to work in Cardiff and then she started to remember who she was and who her friends were and I thought, ‘this is getting a bit weird now’.
“It was good before, as far as our parallels were concerned but now she was doing stuff with kids her age and I thought ‘no, this is a bit weird. I better stop doing this.’”
Despite their breakup, the pair remain close, with Piper recently saying she ‘loved’ their whirlwind romance.
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“Loved that time. Learned so much,” she explained. “Really needed it, after the experiences that I’d had, leading up to that point.
“I felt like I’d actually found a real friend. I guess meeting someone who had experienced [fame] for 20 years, at that level, it was very nurturing.
"And also very drunken, which I needed. I had a lot of fun during those years.”
Topics: Celebrity, Sex and Relationships
Claire Reid