‘I get
called lots of L words – louche, languid, laconic’: Bill Nighy wears cover
wears shirt by Aspesi and jacket by Drakes. Photograph: Sophia Spring/The
Observer
Interview
Bill Nighy:
‘It takes me a long time to recover if I see myself on screen'
Miranda
Sawyer
The
Observer
Film
Famous for
his languid charm, Bill Nighy is anything but relaxed. He talks acting, anxiety
– and the dreadful challenge of casual dressing
Miranda Sawyer
@msmirandasawyer
Sun 26 Jan
2020 08.00 GMT
The first
time I interviewed Bill Nighy was in 2004. Sixteen years ago! He has barely
changed. He is a remarkably consistent person, in taste and personality, and
because of this, he seems ageless. Perhaps a little slimmer and greyer than he
used to be, but that’s it. His hair is styled in the same way it has been for
several decades – longer on the top, slicked back from his forehead – and no
matter what year, what month, what day you catch him, he will be dressed in
what he calls “a decent lounge suit”, in navy, with appropriate shirt and
shoes. Heavy-rimmed specs nestle in his pocket or on his nose.
As familiar
as his outfit is his charm. Nighy is always charming, whether to fans, an
interviewer, a waiter. We meet in a hotel bar around the corner from his
apartment in Piccadilly and the first thing he does is inquire about me and my
life. And he listens to the answer: a nice trait not evident in every
successful actor. He bothers to entertain – his stories are delivered well,
whether they’re about famous people or someone he met out and about. He still
works very hard – often making four or five films a year – and he takes
pleasure in his job and is happy to talk about it. In fact, the only major
change in Nighy in the years I’ve known him is that he is no longer with his
long-term partner, Diana Quick (they separated in 2008, after 28 years
together). They remain on good terms and, he tells me, they had a jolly
Christmas with lots of people around the table. His daughter, Mary, is married
to a Frenchman. “There were charades,” he says. “We sang the Marseillaise. It
was great.”
So there
you have it: same as he ever was. But Nighy is far from dull. On the contrary,
he’s unusual: a very particular person with very particular tastes and habits.
What he likes are clothes, music, books, football, city life. He is a modernist
– “I do subscribe to that ethos” – with the accompanying purist attitude. He
can be wildly funny about his own horror when what he considers to be the
correct etiquette is not upheld. Though he’s played ageing rockers on a couple
of occasions, this is very much not his aesthetic. Anyway, because of all this
– Nighy’s style and politesse, his charisma and wit – he’s often
misinterpreted.
“I get called lots of L words,” he says.
“Louche, languid, laconic. A lounge lizard, like I’m a nuisance around women.”
He isn’t. He avoids romance. In fact, none of those descriptions would be
right.
For a
start, Nighy is far from the manor born. He grew up in Caterham, Surrey, to
Irish parents, in a house attached to his dad’s garage, with petrol pumps
outside the front door. (His dad, like him, was courteous and a snappy dresser:
he styled himself like Bing Crosby and used a cigarette as an accessory.) In
the 1970s, Nighy was friends with other working-class actors, like Julie
Walters and Pete Postlethwaite, when they all worked at the Liverpool Everyman,
and he can get quite angry about establishment attitudes.
But the
main thing people get wrong about Nighy is that they assume he’s relaxed. How
could such a cool cat be anything but chill? Actually, he is naturally fraught.
You can see it in his posture: he sits forward in his seat; he moves swiftly
through crowds, like a knife. He has a tendency to fret, to beat himself up
about stuff. His standards, high in everything, are almost insurmountable when
it comes to himself. He can’t read his own interviews, for instance, because
they send him into a fugue of misery. He can’t watch his own films for the same
reason. He doesn’t see what his fans see, which is an intelligent, gifted actor
being brilliant at his job.
This is
what he sees: “You look terrible,” he says. “Well, you look terrible according
to you, unless you’re a weirdo and you look at yourself and you think, ‘Wow, I
look pretty good.’ But I’m not one of those. So there’s that to get over, and
then you’ve got to watch yourself act and see yourself not pulling off all
those things you thought you might, this time, have pulled off. Instead, you
did that default thing that you always do. You think, ‘I did that again? Are
you serious?’”
‘I did that
again? Are you serious?’: Bill Nighy wears shirt by Drakes; trousers by Scott
Fraser and shoes by Joseph Cheaney & Sons
These might
seem trivialities, but they knock him sideways. “The trouble is that confidence
is a movable feast and I’m not famous for it,” he says. “And, therefore, it
takes me quite a long time to recover if I see myself on screen. Because all my
fears about my inadequacies are confirmed when I watch myself. I know there’s
an answer, and the answer is, get over yourself. But that’s hard. I suppose
it’s a form of dysmorphia. I mean, I hope it’s a form of dysmorphia.”
All of this
means that he’s rarely seen one of his films or TV shows the whole way through
(sometimes he sees bits, because he has to record extra dialogue after
filming). Which is a shame, obviously, because he’s been in some absolute
crackers: State of Play; Still Crazy; Notes on a Scandal; Gideon’s Daughter;
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; Sometimes Always Never.
And to this
long CV of fabulously watchable stuff, we can add the movie we are here to talk
about: Emma. Yes, yes, it’s ye olde Jane Austen, but this is a new version,
directed by LA rock photographer Autumn de Wilde, and it’s great, even for
those of us who are naturally allergic to Austen films. Nighy himself tends to
avoid period drama: partly because of the costumes and partly because they tend
to provoke a particular type of acting. “Everybody starts standing in a certain
way and talking in a certain way,” he says. “It’s the same with Shakespeare, or
Chekhov. Or Harold Pinter: everyone’s got a weird voice. It’s odd how that
style is handed down. I don’t think it’s even spoken about. And it’s very hard
to resist. I mean, I’m not immune.”
But this
new Emma, while it uses old-fashioned language, avoids such clichés. The
emotions are understandable. Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton wrote the
script, and the cast is not as you might predict, meaning it’s not an English
luvvie-fest. Nighy is great. It’s hard to think of him being bad in anything,
despite his self-criticism. His character, Emma’s father, Mr Woodhouse, is
constantly worried about draughts and the cold. There’s an amazing moment at
the start of a dinner party where someone mentions that there might be snow,
and he immediately starts panicking and insists everyone leaves.
“He’s a
valetudinarian,” says Nighy. “Not to be confused with a hypochondriac.
Hypochondria is being selfishly concerned with your own health. Valetudinarians
are obsessively concerned with other people’s. And therefore he lives in terror
of draughts and any kind of change in the weather. He’s always thinking that
everyone’s going to die. Which is ridiculous until you start reading anything
about 1815, and you realise he’s got a point.”
Nighy chose
to do Emma because he liked De Wilde. “I’d never met anyone like her, she is
very unusual. This California person with a punk ethic.” He went for a meeting
with her and instead of opening a laptop and showing him her vision on a
screen, De Wilde presented him with a wooden box, tied with a bow. Inside were
around 60 paper frames, like Regency portraits, with pictures inside. One was
of him: Nighy was her first choice for Woodhouse.
De Wilde is
one of several female directors whom Nighy has worked with. He is baffled as to
why anyone might see it as a male occupation. “I mean, what? Why on earth would
one set of genitalia recommend you, rather than another?” Anyway, he loved her.
He enjoys other people’s idiosyncrasies. He tells me about Emma’s director of
photography, Christopher Blauvelt, who comes from a skateboarding background,
which Nighy thought “deeply impressive”.
“He has a
punk band with his wife called Rat Shit!” he says, delightedly. During filming,
Nighy once caught Blauvelt lying on the ground, checking a shot. “Maintain the
bonnet,” said Blauvelt, in his LA skater drawl. Nighy found this so delicious
that he had a Fred Perry shirt especially altered for Blauvelt: he got Maintain
The Bonnet embroidered over the pocket. Maroon, on blue.
‘A
modernist? I do subscribe to that ethos’: Bill Nighy in a Golfer jacket ‘with a
zip that goes both ways’ by Grenfell and a turtle neck by Sunspel. Photograph:
Sophia Spring/The Observer
Nighy is
obsessed with clothes. When this magazine asked him to wear something for
photos other than his usual suit, he took it as a challenge, asking a stylist
friend to help him out. We discuss what he wore, and Nighy goes into mad
detail. He chose a couple of jumpers (“fine wool, nothing vulgar or chunky”),
and actually took off his suit jacket. “I wore a jacket called the Golfer, made
by Grenfell, which is essentially a short Harrington, but in olive green, not
blue. It has the plaid on the inside. And the groovy thing, the thing that
makes it all OK, is that the zip goes both ways, up and down.” Of course,
pre-shoot, he had been nervous, but he bumped into two fans, ladies from
America, while walking there, and they were complimentary. He “held on to this”
for confidence, while in front of the camera.
Nighy is
not designed for leisurewear, nor for leisure-life. When he was shooting
Pirates of the Caribbean (he played a giant squid with a Scottish accent) he
stayed indoors in his room, with the curtains shut, while the film’s other
actors spent their days off cavorting in the warm sea. By the end of the shoot,
he still didn’t know which way the beach was. He’s just done another film,
Minamata, with his old Pirates chum Johnny Depp, who he describes as
“Completely charming, gracious as ever, everyone gets treated impeccably.”
Nighy finds most actors easy to get on with. “Ninety-five per cent of everybody
in my world are decent, smart, funny people,” he says. “Everybody rubs along
together because they’ve got very used to getting to know people at some depth
quite quickly and over a short period of time, and then going on to do it with
another 100 people. And if anybody is sort of an obstacle of any kind, often
they don’t prosper.”
He works a
lot, because he gets asked a lot. “It’s a job,” he says. “I still get more than
four weeks off a year, which is more than most people.” When he’s not working,
Nighy likes to mooch around. He goes to bookshops, has a lunch, reads the
newspaper at a café table. He’s just made a playlist for Maison Assouline, a
café he frequents in Piccadilly. Because he’s in there so often, he asked the
waitress if she was sick of hearing Lovely Day by Bill Withers (“It’s a great
song, but it was on a lot”). The waitress confessed that she was a bit bored,
so Nighy spent weeks making a playlist. It has more than 100 songs on it. He
shows me it on his phone, reading out the tracks with intense delight. Angie
Stone, Dr John, Prince, Mary J Blige… He has a separate playlist of Mary J,
which he also shows me; and another that just features several versions of one
song, Be Thankful For What You’ve Got (original by William DeVaughn, he
informs). The man is a proper music spotter.
He made the
playlist partly because he enjoys it, but also because he loves cafés. “I’ve
spent quite a lot of time in New York, because of doing plays,” he says. “And
for a while I couldn’t work out what was slightly unsatisfactory about it. And
it’s because they don’t really have cafés. They have bars and they have diners,
all of which are great. But they’re not cafés. There were a few, but they don’t
have many where you sit out on the pavement.”
It’s what
he loves. He walks everywhere, because he hates feeling encumbered and he
associates having a car with that feeling, an extra thing to think about, some
more keys to carry. “I can always get a cab if needed, and I’ve got my Oyster
card, you know.” The countryside doesn’t appeal: “I pop in now and again and
have a look.” The sea is OK, for a short while. “For an outing. Outings are the
way forward. An outing to the seaside and then back home for tea.” It’s the
city life for him. He doesn’t mind being recognised, or having his photo taken
with fans. “People are perfectly gracious. And it all happens very quickly and
it’s nice.”
Before he
goes, I feel we should discuss Nighy’s other love: football.
Characteristically, he has an individual approach to fandom. He’s a Crystal
Palace supporter – they’re the team whose results he checks first – but he
flatly refuses to get involved in the macho, tribal aspect of football. “Only
because I’m greedy,” he says. “Last year, mostly I was watching Italian
football. Because I love all of the names and I love the strips and I love the
glamour and I love that they’ve got great hair, they’re all better looking than
us. I’ve been watching Inter Milan since Antonio Conte went with them. He’s got
a very interesting team, with Sensi and Barella and all these wonderful
players. I love that Ancelotti is in England… Ancelotti at Everton, for me,
it’s just a wonderful thing. He’s such an incredible man, unparalleled in his
career as both a player and as a manager. I love Liverpool, too. They’re great
to watch, they use the young players. Jürgen is some kind of maestro.”
I don’t
know quite how he does it, really. Who else could manage to express support for
both Everton and Liverpool and make it utterly logical and charming? But Bill
Nighy is a very particular man. And he’s not going to change. Thank goodness
for that.
 |
| Emma is in cinemas from 14 February |
Platters
that matter: a selection from Bill Nighy’s café playlist
Wish I
Didn’t Miss You Angie Stone
Mama Roux
Dr John
Leave it
Smoking’ Tamia
Stay This
Way The Brand New Heavies
Crazy
Ab‘Bout You Baby Ike and Tina Turner
Boo’d Up
Ella Mai
Every Day I
Write the Book Elvis Costello and the Attractions
Crystal
Clear Pharrell Williams
Only a Fool
Would Say Steely Dan
Breakfast
Can Wait Prince
By Your
Side Sade
Warm on a
Cold Night Honne
U + Me (Love
Lesson) Mary J Blige
Higher Than
the World Van Morrison with George Benson
Tramp Otis
Redding and Carla Thomas
Styling by
Tanja Martin; stylist assistant Elena Garcia; grooming by Celine Nonon using
Dermalogica Skincare; shot at the home of Kate Watson-Smyth,
madaboutthehouse.com
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