Bill Nighy<\/a> says breezily. He is speaking to me from north-west London, where he has been nosing around bookshops. \u201cI\u2019m also an enthusiastic texter. I was always very quick on the old Nokia. Quite proud of myself, I was.\u201d Where does he stand on emojis? \u201cI used to be philosophically opposed. Most of them are a bit naff.\u201d He then proceeds to list the exceptions. \u201cI like the flamingo and the purple dahlia. I like the leaping shark. Sometimes I combine it with the leaping dolphin. Very occasionally, I like the golfer in mid-swing if I\u2019m congratulating someone. I don\u2019t do smiley faces.\u201d<\/p>\ndouble quotation markWhat one thing would make me turn down an acting job? Togas <\/p>\n
Communicating over Zoom is a no-go, hence our phone conversation today. \u201cIt got to the point where every time I had a Zoom call, it made me unhappy. I\u2019m old enough to be able to say, \u2018Can I retire from Zoom?\u2019\u201d At 76, he has ruled out other undesirable experiences. \u201cFood where you talk about work. That\u2019s one. Particularly lunch. You have to sit there for so long and it just confuses the issue. Working lunches are absolutely out of the question now.\u201d He has never been much of a partygoer either, and used to get what he calls \u201ca thrill, or a kind of anti-thrill\u201d from putting invitations, especially highly prized ones, straight in the bin. When I ask if there is any one thing that is likely to make him turn down an acting job, his answer is instant and unequivocal: \u201cTogas.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018No fireworks, no reaching for prizes\u2019 \u2026 Imelda Staunton and Bill Nighy in & Sons. Photograph: Icon Film Distribution<\/p>\n
No such garments in & Sons, which pits Nighy as Dyer against his vexed older offspring (played by Johnny Flynn and George MacKay) and the ex-wife (Imelda Staunton) who has never forgiven him for siring a son (Hamnet\u2019s Noah Jupe) by another woman. The old man has been an abrasive and emotionally absent parent, but appears to believe his literary talent excuses that. Nighy has no time for such guff. \u201cIt\u2019s like when footballers behave badly on the pitch and people say, \u2018Temperament is part of his genius.\u2019 Give me a break. That\u2019s anathema to me. I don\u2019t believe it in the least.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dyer claims his goal as a father was to \u201cdo no harm\u201d. Nighy himself has a daughter \u2013 the actor-director Mary Nighy \u2013 by his ex-partner, the actor Diana Quick, whom he was with for 27 years until 2008. Did he start out with a parenting philosophy? \u201cBlimey, Ryan. It\u2019s a long time ago.\u201d Indeed: he has two grandchildren now. \u201cBut no. Not really. You make it up as you go along. You make mistakes, then correct them, and hopefully you arrive at something that works. My parents were not oppressive or unkind, and I didn\u2019t want to be either.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unkindness is fully part of Dyer\u2019s repertoire in & Sons, along with rage and misanthropy \u2013 none of them qualities that Nighy is typically asked to play. \u201cI\u2019m not thought of in those terms,\u201d he agrees. \u201cThough of course, half my work is not in living memory. You get to the stage where everyone who watched it is dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ll never be Steve McQueen\u2019 \u2026 Nighy as Davy Jones in Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World\u2019s End. Photograph: Disney\/Kobal\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n
Strangers still commend him on his performance as the unvarnished ex-rocker Billy Mack, who blithely admits that his new Christmas single is a \u201cfestering turd\u201d, in Richard Curtis\u2019s 2003 romcom Love Actually. Nighy has made his share of blockbusters, including two voyages with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, where he was hidden behind a beard of writhing, computer-generated tentacles. But it is the gentler figures, endearingly flawed, for which he is truly cherished, whether bracingly frank like Billy or sweetly diffident: the terminally ill, buttoned-up bureaucrat in Living, which earned the actor his only Oscar nomination to date; the husband who chickens out of cheating on his wife in Lawless Heart; or the Scrabble enthusiast searching for his missing son in Sometimes Always Never.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t count him out as a sex symbol either. One early success was The Men\u2019s Room, the raunchy 1991 BBC series in which his explicit scenes as a libidinous academic earned the censure of the Broadcasting Standards Council. After playing Nighy\u2019s wife in Notes on a Scandal, Cate Blanchett asked a journalist: \u201cWhat thinking western woman do you know who wouldn\u2019t want to embrace him?\u201d<\/p>\n
If he is typecast today, it doesn\u2019t faze him. \u201cMaybe there are people out there who like it when I do the things I always do. Just like I always want Steve McQueen to do what he does.\u201d What has Nighy learned from the minimalist star of The Great Escape? \u201cThat I\u2019ll never be Steve McQueen,\u201d he sighs. \u201cYou need a lot of confidence to do what he did. No fireworks, no reaching for prizes. It\u2019s a kind of reckless restraint.\u201d Prince is another hero. \u201cEverything Prince did was attractive. Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat \u2026 well, I\u2019ll follow them anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was writers who were the object of his youthful idolatry: Hemingway, Fitzgerald. There is a special poignancy, then, in seeing Nighy as a novelist in & Sons, since that is what he wanted to be for many years. Blame Mr Weir, the English teacher at his Catholic grammar school. \u201cHe told me, \u2018You might want to try your hand at the novel.\u2019 I must have been 14. I\u2019m not claiming this as an early sign of my neglected genius. But it was like a bomb going off in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oscar-nominated buttoned-up bureaucrat \u2026 Nighy in Living, 2022. Photograph: Album\/Alamy<\/p>\n
At 15, he got a job on The Field, the hunting and fishing magazine. What were his responsibilities? \u201cI changed the roller towel in the ladies\u2019 room. All the girls from the typing pool used to come in. Not because of my animal magnetism, I hasten to add, but because they knew they could make me blush. Those roller towels are quite tricky. I\u2019d bugger it up and they\u2019d start laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there was the day he landed in trouble with the boss. \u201cI\u2019m from a small town \u2013 Caterham in Surrey \u2013 and I used to become very excited if I saw a Roller or a Bentley in the street. I got pulled up in front of the CEO because he\u2019d driven past me and I\u2019d started jumping up and down and waving. He said, \u2018That\u2019s not what I expect from an employee.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Nighy\u2019s next stop was Paris. \u201cI am a walking, talking cliche,\u201d he says. \u201cI ran away to be a writer. Like a million others, I went straight to [the bookshop] Shakespeare & Company and hung about thinking I\u2019d write killer sentences and find a girlfriend. Neither of which happened. I ended up begging on the Trocad\u00e9ro.\u201d He didn\u2019t relinquish his literary dreams so much as let them wilt. \u201cSomeone suggested I go to drama school, and that became what I did. I thought I\u2019d get around to writing eventually. I\u2019m still thinking it. I\u2019m just very good at procrastination.\u201d<\/p>\n
He may not have a novel in the works but a kind of verbal memoir is unspooling, 25 minutes at a time, in the form of his podcast, Ill-Advised<\/a>, in which he serves as a soothing agony uncle, meanderingly answering listeners\u2019 queries about everything from fashion to avoiding social faux pas. Off-the-cuff being his preferred mode, he never sees the questions before recording. \u201cI ramble on the spot but I find that I\u2019ve thought about whatever the subject might be. I\u2019ve already thought about trousers, for instance, because I\u2019m a bit of a fetishist about lounge suits and shirt collars.\u201d<\/p>\nIll-Advised, which is about to launch its third series, has more than 300,000 monthly listeners and was named 2026 Podcast of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild. That doesn\u2019t stop Nighy being comically apologetic about it. \u201cI tried not to have a podcast,\u201d he assures me, giving the impression, as he usually does, that he has secured his tremendous career and the esteem of audiences, critics and contemporaries simply by the happy accident of stepping off the lift at the wrong floor. Perhaps he won\u2019t ever be mistaken for Steve McQueen. His compliments about that actor, though, could plainly be applied to him, too. No fireworks, no reaching for prizes. A master of reckless restraint.<\/p>\n
& Sons is in cinemas from 21 August. The third series of Ill-Advised begins on 3 September.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dying patriarch summons his brood for a dramatic announcement. It may not be the most original starting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":736455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-736454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/736455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}