There is an art to being Bill Nighy. I don’t mean that he drags on some kind of bogus persona, but, if any semi-awake comedian were impersonating him, they would have a fair idea where to begin. A good suit. Solid spectacles. Old-school civility. That has been the package for as long as we have known him.
As he potters into a five-star hotel in Dublin, I make the mistake of asking what he is up to. Plenty, as ever. He just did a television series with Helena Bonham Carter called California Avenue. He is shooting a show in Liverpool called (counterintuitively) A Town in Nova Scotia. He flaps an arm before offering an apology that he really doesn’t need to make.
“I hesitate to bring this up, but I’m pretending to be Irish. So God help us all,” he says. “May my mother forgive me.”
That is only right and proper. Both grandparents were born in the old country. Nighy, long resident in London, recently eliminated any possible objections to claiming the nationality by bagging an Irish passport. He always felt the connection, but, like many among the diaspora in Britain, Brexit nudged him into taking the leap.
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Anyway, he has never had a problem with accents. We meet before the release of a winsome new feature called 500 Miles. Morgan Matthews’s film sends two English kids, Charlie and Finn, on an odyssey across Britain and Ireland to meet up with their eccentric Irish grandad in a picturesque corner of Co Kerry. Every vowel is in the right place.
“I’m so relieved to hear you say that,” Nighy says.
Does having relatives who spoke in that accent help?
“No, it’s nothing to do with that, really,” he says. “It’s just that I have a not-bad ear for accents. The rest is application. I get people to record it into my phone. I always get four or five voices of whatever the accent might be: Australians or Yorkshire or Welsh or, in this case, Irish. I have hundreds of voicemails on my phone: either me trying to do it or other people doing it for me.”
Did he get to enjoy Dingle?
“No, that was all in Wicklow, he says. “I was in Wicklow the whole time. I stayed in Killiney. That was very pleasant. Thank you very much. And I had my dinner every night in Dalkey. It was lovely. Beautiful weather. Fabulous coastline. An idyllic place to shoot.”
Nighy is quite the professional. That is just what you might expect from someone who spent so many years as a striver. He has been on stage and screen for 50 years or so, but it was not until the turn of the century that most casual moviegoers put a name to the oft-glimpsed face. The fading rock star in Love Actually helped. His barnacled Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean films helped further. Virtually overnight he became a national treasure whom audiences had unwittingly cherished for years (if that paradox can stand up).
I wonder if the long period flying just below the radar explains why he still works so hard. Nighy regularly clocks up three or four credits a year. Those actors who remember when they still worried about making the mortgage often keep their shoulder hard to the wheel after proper success strikes.
“There is definitely an element of that with actors like me who had a reasonably tricky time early doors,” he says. “Work was intermittent. And you didn’t have any money for quite a long time. Or you had some money but not very much. There is an element of that: if I turn this down they’ll never ask me again. I’m always saying these things defensively, because people say, ‘You’re a workaholic,’ or something. I do get defensive, which probably means they’re right. Ha ha!”
Nighy didn’t come from any sort of snooty background. Dad managed a garage in Caterham, a Surrey town on the edge of London. A few years ago the actor told me that his hard-working mum was “basically Irish”. That is a fair description of many second-generation immigrants to Britain.
“My mother was born in Glasgow,” he says. “Her parents, like a lot of Irish people, came to Glasgow looking for work – and not very successfully. They lived in the Gorbals, in the tenements where most of the Irish community was based. They were a large Catholic family.
“And then somehow they moved down to a little town in Surrey where there was work, because they put all the asylums there – and I use the word carefully, because they weren’t what you would now call psychiatric hospitals. They were warehousing people in difficulty of various kinds. And my mother was a state-registered nurse there.”
Talking to his parents and grandparents, he got some sense of how hard it could then be for the Irish “down south”.
“They weren’t always welcome in England during that period,” he says. “You had the dreadful sign, ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish,’ or whichever order it was in. That was in my lifetime. It was still perfectly acceptable to put that sign outside your boarding house.”
Nighy’s circuitous route to the acting profession has been much chewed over. The young Bill initially wanted to be a writer, and with that in mind he ran off to Paris and starved in a garret for a while. The “great British short story” he intended to create never got on to paper. He eventually trundled home to Caterham and recalibrated his ambitions. The Left Bank’s loss was ultimately the South Bank’s gain.
“Most of my idols were writers or musicians,” Nighy says. “I didn’t really have acting idols at all. I really did it for two reasons. I did it to try and impress a girl, and because I thought it was an alternative to a conventional job. I was on the run from a conventional job. I wasn’t very good at knowing what I wanted to do, but I was really world class at knowing what I didn’t want to do.”
He had a spell as a journalist at The Field, the posh magazine for hunting-and-shooting types, before unsuccessfully applying to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Bouncing back from that rejection, he enrolled at Guildford School of Dance and Drama, alma mater of Celia Imrie and Brenda Blethyn, before embarking on what sounds like an enviable early career with some of the era’s most exciting companies.
He spent time at the Everyman in Liverpool opposite such greats as Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite. He collaborated with David Hare, who was emerging as a playwright of note, at the Van Load travelling-theatre company.
Nighy explains that, as he got deeper into the business, certain fellow actors did begin to have an influence.
“It wasn’t until I was quite far into things that I began to select certain performers, like Michael Gambon,” he says. “He was somebody who was of that generation, just 10 minutes before mine, who didn’t seem to be confined by the conventions that were around in terms of performance in those days. He was unexpected and slightly worrying, and he was touched by genius.”
I can see how Nighy would have been drawn to that late actor. The younger man is not so eccentric – Gambon’s interviews were legendarily unreliable – but both have a way with a yarn you’d expect from a London Irishman.
“There would be moments when you saw him on stage where he would be sublime. It was beyond being in a play. Everyone else would be in a play, but Michael could reach some other level of performance.”
Nighy has always been hip. Or has he been suave? Or can you be both? At any rate, for all the haggard eccentrics he has played on screen and on stage, the actor himself always arrives as the most urbane human in the room.
An avid music fan, he selected tunes by Bob Dylan (Just Like Tom Thumb Blues), The Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter) and Marvin Gaye (My Love Is Waiting) for his turn on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Do the sums and you conclude that, now 76, he is just old enough to have enjoyed the cultural excesses of the 1960s. Don’t tell us the tales were all myths. Please.
“Well, the thing was, as somebody said, the Swinging Sixties was 200 people in west London,” Nighy says. “And the rest of the country was getting on like it always did, in black and white. I was from out of town. I was a suburban boy.
“I remember my drama school asked me to go back and talk. Somebody pointed out we were here in 1968. Really? Was it that long ago? The Daily Mirror called 1968 the Summer of Love. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I missed the summer of love because nobody told me about it.’ I didn’t read the Daily Mirror. Ha ha!”
He goes on to eulogise uncelebrated Caterham as a decent place to grow up.
“There was quite a large Irish community and Scots community, because there was a lot of work down in the asylums. And they were good jobs. So I grew up in a little gang. We were that little slacker gang, you know, like suburban slackers?”
And, yes, there is something about those quiet suburbs that generates creative rebellion. David Bowie was from the outer ring. So was Siouxsie Sioux.
“I’m always obscurely proud of that, because you had that extraordinary thing: all those white boys with guitars. Jeff Beck was from Wallington, where I took my driver’s test. Mick Jagger is from Dartford. Keith Richards is from Dartford. Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton were from Ripley.”
Nighy owns to living an agreeable life through the 1970s and 1980s. He was romantically attached to Diana Quick, the charismatic actor, from 1982 until 2008, but they never seem to have considered getting married. “Marriage is sort of back in now, isn’t it?” he told me a decade or so ago. “There wasn’t a lot if it about back then.”
From the mid-1980s he engaged with the great works as part of the National Theatre Company in central London. I recall seeing him opposite Anthony Hopkins in Shakespeare’s King Lear (Hopkins as a youngish Lear) and in Pravda, by Howard Brenton and David Hare (Hopkins as a variation on Rupert Murdoch). Those were bold, heroic productions.
“I remember standing behind a set, waiting to go on for the first night of Pravda,” he says. “And Anthony said, ‘How are you feeling?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m sh**ting myself.’ He said, ‘So am I.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t it get any better?’ He said, ‘No, it gets f**king worse.’ And he was right, because it does.”
An interesting comment. Nighy gives a good impression of cruising comfortably through the trials and pressures of the profession. Then again, some of the greatest actors have suffered crippling stage fright: Ian Holm, David Warner, Roy Marsden. It is not normal to bare yourself nightly before a few hundred strangers.
“I’m terrified, but it hasn’t scared me off,” Nighy says. “But I don’t know that I’m going to be doing a play anytime soon. Who knows? If it’s something that I can’t bear to see somebody else do, then maybe.”
The contained world of film and television does at least keep an actor away from the crowds. You can see him in Notes on a Scandal, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and the Underworld vampire flicks. He tells me – not something you’d immediately guess – that he is most often recognised for his role in Richard Curtis’s supernatural romance About Time. Four years ago he received a deserved Oscar nomination for playing the dying protagonist of Oliver Hermanus’s Living. He had, by then, put in enough hours to be dubbed “overdue”.
“It’s a very odd experience, because you don’t volunteer to be nominated,” he says in his bemused manner. “You don’t volunteer to have all of this brought into your life. You’re supposed to uncomplicatedly welcome it. And it’s very good for business, and it was very good for the film.”
I am sure an Oscar nomination is good for the Bill Nighy business. Not that he ever seems to be short of work; 500 Miles, a film stuffed with goodwill, brought him back to Ireland. There is a fair bit in the picture about loss. There is a great deal about the immigrant experience.
“I still grieve for my mum and my dad,” he says. “I would like my father to have shared in my good fortune, because I have been fortunate beyond expectation. He would have been completely astonished. And I would have enjoyed his astonishment, but unfortunately he died before anything astonishing happened.”
More astonishment to come? I don’t see Nighy as the pipe-and-slippers type.
“I suppose I am now past retirement age,” he says. “But I’ve heard about retirement, and I don’t like the sound of it.”
500 Miles is in cinemas from Friday, May 15th
