INTERVIEW:It is impossible not to like Bill Nighy, a late starter in the acting world, but a star in his own class of loveable eccentric, writes DONALD CLARKE.
‘YOU DO FORGET, sometimes,” the peerless Bill Nighy muses. “I’ll be in the newspaper shop and somebody will start scrutinising me. I’ll think: have I forgotten to do something up? And then I’ll remember: oh yeah, I am famous.”
I’d bet that newsagents and such are always pretty happy to see Nighy. I’m certain strangers never shout “pillock” when he passes on the street. “Yeah, now you mention it, that’s true. Mind you, having said that, somebody will now shout ‘pillock’ when I walk out of this hotel.”
No, they won't. Everybody likes Bill Nighy. He has been sinister in the Pirates of the Caribbeanfilms and positively Mephistophelean in the Underworld horror flicks. He was the voice of a confused rabbit in The Magic Roundaboutand designer of the earth in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But, since he belatedly achieved fame in the mid-1990s, we have liked him best as a louche urbane charmer with, as often as not, a taste for cigarettes and booze. He played that role in Still Crazyand Love, Actuallyand revisits it in Richard Curtis's The Boat that Rocked.If you want a cleverer, less caddish Terry-Thomas, Bill Nighy's your man.
"I had the privilege of appearing beside Keith Richards in the last Piratesfilm," Nighy, a serious Stones fan, muses. "I was on the red carpet and some guy shouted: 'You're a great friend of Keith Richards, right?' I had to explain: 'No. I just look like him.' I was rather proud of that answer." Nighy doesn't really look that much like Keith Richards. On reflection, he doesn't look like Terry-Thomas either. In a well-cut suit and nicely ironed shirt, Nighy is very much his own class of loveable eccentric. His fingers permanently curled inwards by a rare condition called Dupuytren's contracture, his blond hair in an advanced stage of disorder, he sits hunched at a right angle to my chair and – though smashing company – never makes eye contact. I can't quite tell whether he is enjoying himself.
"Oh, I love doing this," he says. "When you are promoting a Richard Curtis film, people tend to be quite cheerful. Hey, it's always a good day when you don't have to act." Unless you have been living in a hole, you will know that The Boat that Rockedconcerns itself with a 1960s pirate radio station that looks a little like Radio Caroline. Nighy turns up as the owner of the ship from which the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Chris O'Dowd broadcast pop music to the nation. Nighy is 59, so I guess he would remember the rock years.
“I do, but I’m not nostalgic about the 1960s or the 1970s. I don’t like that phenomenon where people of my age taunt the young about what they missed. It was like being young in any era. I guess that explosion into electric rock could not now be replicated. But there were some brilliant records and some terrible records – just like now.”
Still, Nighy, who was raised in a sleepy corner of Surrey, admits that music did actually change his life. In the early 1960s, when he was still just a teenager, he became so intoxicated by Bob Dylan’s anthems to the open road that he tossed his schoolbag in the bin and headed off for the Far East. As it happened, he got only as far as southern France, before panicking and begging his dad to send enough funds for the return journey. But a year or so later, not yet 18, he made a serious effort to settle in Paris.
“I wanted to become Ernest Hemingway,” he says. “I was intending to write great sentences and wait for the future Mrs Nighy to saunter by. It was all about girls, really. I think Françoise Hardy would have done nicely. But I didn’t become a writer because I didn’t have the guts.” That’s an interesting comment. To be a writer, you just have to sit in a room and hammer keys. Being an actor is, surely, a much scarier business. “It sort of is. I know. I didn’t really know what it meant to be an actor. In the beginning it just meant being in Berkshire or at the Everyman in Liverpool with Julie Waters and Pete Postlethwaite. I never imagined I’d be on the telly, and I certainly never imagined I’d be in a film.”
Nighy drifted into acting when, following his return from that Parisian garret, a friend suggested he audition for the Guildford School of Dance and Drama. Thus began a slow (but steady) ascent to the comfortable degree of recognition he now enjoys. As he explains it, he spent his 20s in regional theatre, his 30s at the National Theatre in London and his 40s rushing between the National and the sets of independent British films. It wasn't until 2003, when he played a washed-up rock star in Curtis' Love, Actually, that he achieved even a modicum of fame outside the UK. Nighy claims that, even during the slow times, his spirits rarely wavered. He managed to sustain a relationship with Diana Quick, the well-spoken English actor, for 27 years (they split amicably last year) and the couple made enough money to keep their daughter in plimsolls and gymslips. But he has admitted that he developed a problem with the booze and with other less legal stimulants.
“Yes, I did have a serious problem,” he says, as he hunches even more dramatically. “I have a metabolism that is vulnerable to mood-altering chemicals – whatever they may be, liquid or not. I didn’t volunteer for that. I just got lucky and was able to stop. That is a central fact in my life and it’s something I am vigilant about and something I rejoice about. I got to be free and that’s a beautiful thing.” Is he the sort of fellow who could as easily become hooked on trainspotting as brandy? “I am never quite satisfied with that phrase, ‘addictive personality’. It’s more mundane than that. It’s a biological thing. I don’t know if that is anybody else’s experience, but it is mine. I now know what not to put in my system. But I suppose having that mindset enables one to do an impersonation of an obsessive.”
Well, quite. Few actors have been asked to be drunk in quite so many films. Indeed, as far back as the mid-1980s, he read for the role of Withnail, British cinema's greatest boozer, in the mighty Withnail and I.He's at it again in The Boat that Rocked. He's swilling back the gin. He sucking back the fags. Yet the real Bill has been sober for a decade and a half.
“I can’t quite explain it,” he laughs. “But I suppose I do sound like somebody who was once in a rock band. I don’t like to watch myself or listen to myself. But the other day I accidentally heard myself on the answering machine and I do sound like one of those guys. Very odd.” Yes. There is something classless about Nighy. Like Keith Richards or Charlie Watts, he has a voice that, despite a relatively humble upbringing, sounds somewhat posh to contemporary ears. Nighy’s dad managed a garage and his mum was a nurse.
"Yeah. Well, I did go to grammar school and that has an effect," he says. "You posh-up at those places. But, as a friend of mine said, I am a class traitor. That's what I am: a class traitor." At any rate, he now appears to have occupied several distinct territories within the entertainment industry. Big, serious performances in plays such as David Hare's The Vertical Hourand films such as Notes on a Scandalalternate with campy turns in the Piratesfilms and – coming your way soon – G-Force. When I mention the latter Jerry Bruckheimer picture, Bill launches into convincingly sincere raptures about its unlikely plot: he plays a mad scientist who aims to defeat a team of highly trained, socially responsible guinea pigs. After several decades struggling to making ends meet, he has, I guess, a right to enjoy the fruits of mainstream fame. I wonder, given his early taste for the sauce, if he would have coped well with celebrity at a younger age.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he says. “But I think I would say ‘no’. Maybe I would have messed my way through. Who knows? It never happened. I was actually incredibly lucky. Being in this business is like being a gambler. If, as a British actor, you work most of the time, you’re lucky. There were times when I didn’t know where the mortgage payments were coming from. But we always managed.”
Does he have any regrets? “Oh, you know. As someone cleverer than me said, if I’d known how well it would work out, I’d have had more fun along the way.”