The pop superstar on her extraordinary year – the Bond theme, that Vogue cover, the success of her second album – and hosting Saturday Night Live
It’s a measure of what Billie Eilish’s life has been like in 2021 that she woke up one morning last month, rolled over to check her phone and found out she’d got seven Grammy award nominations. She’d overslept the actual announcement. “I was up late, watching Fleabag. Again!”
We’re speaking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “This is my third time watching Fleabag. I’ve literally just paused it, again, to do this interview. Andrew Scott is my favourite actor in the world! And Phoebe [Waller-Bridge] is so fucking good, I can’t stress it enough. When I met her at the Bond premiere, I was trying not to blow smoke up her ass the entire night.”
Eilish would be a standout figure of 2021 for her Grammy-winning title music for No Time to Die alone, written, as always, with her big brother, Finneas. It premiered at the pre-Covid 2020 Brit awards and was finally unleashed in the cinemas just over two months ago (“We saw the whole movie in December 2019… we’ve had to keep all the secrets for two years… that was hard!”). But the Bond theme is old news, given everything else that has happened this past year.
