PERSON OF INTEREST
BRITISH CHARACTER ACTOR BILL NIGHY ENJOYS HIS PERFORMANCES VICARIOUSLY — IF AT ALL
For professional reasons, I have seen Bill Nighy’s latest film. For professional reasons, Nighy himself has not. Everyone seems to find Nighy immensely watchable — except the man himself. As a young actor, he told friends to watch him on TV, not realizing how much he would dislike the sight. After the broadcast, he “walked around town all night thinking I have to do something else for a living, because it was so humiliating.”
So, not watching his performances is “the only way to do it.” Nighy has to enjoy them through other people’s reactions. “If I see it, all of that is stolen from me. It could be because I have an all-around dysmorphia or because I have better taste than everybody else.” Where they presumably see a suave professional, he would see “the little bits of compromise, the little bits of cowardice.”
He made an exception for Pirates of the Caribbean, in which his face was replaced by computer-generated tentacles.
Nighy’s insecurity has inspired ingenious workarounds. One director, Autumn de Wilde, mused about making a special cut of Emma. with none of Nighy’s scenes. Thea Sharrock, maker of his latest film, The Beautiful Game, allowed him to record his additional dialogue without the visuals on. In person, too, the insecurity can need managing: the last time he did an interview with the FT, in 2011, he was so unhappy with his performance that he insisted on doing another interview the next day.
Yet something has changed. Nighy is now 74. It’s two decades since his Bafta-winning breakthrough part in Love Actually, as the old rock star willing to insult his own Christmas record. Last year, he received his first Oscar nomination for Living, bringing to life Kazuo Ishiguro’s script about a civil servant with terminal cancer.
“I had a tendency — it’s still there, but it’s not as virulent — to dismiss anything I’d done, and to catastrophize about it afterward quite violently. I would just write things off. That was half my life. I don’t do it anymore.”
At the Oscars, he bemused photographers by brandishing his granddaughter’s Sylvanian Families rabbit, which had found its way into his luggage. Overall he felt “pretty relaxed. I’m quite old, and I think you run out of the energy to undermine yourself so vigorously. It’s just like, ‘F--k off, leave me alone, whoever you are, because I’m a perfectly reasonable person and here I am anyway — here we all are, so why not me?’”
Nighy does seem perfectly reasonable — neat, polite, engaged. He gives away enough to seem interesting, not enough to seem off-balance.
The Beautiful Game centres on the Homeless World Cup. He plays the England team’s wizened coach, managing a bunch of misfits and one failed starlet. Thin as a goalpost, he looks like the least athletic football manager in history. But he loves the game, far beyond his local childhood team, Crystal Palace.
The Beautiful Game is a World Cup drama with an activist twist. Some actors had played in the real Homeless World Cup. Previously Nighy fronted a campaign for a tax on financial transactions. He is also an ambassador for the charity Oxfam, recently backing calls for more aid and climate spending.
I wonder whether his social conscience comes from an unease with his belated success. He grew up the son of a Surrey garage owner, and went to drama school in Guildford. He was 53 before Love Actually made him famous. “I don’t know if I have anymore of a social conscience than you do,” he shrugs. But as an actor, people ask him to highlight things — and “there’s only one answer to that question, which is yes. You try to do films that, however indirectly, however much of a stretch, help.”
The most moving part of The Beautiful Game involves a recovering heroin addict, Nathan (Callum Scott Howells), who doesn’t stick to his methadone prescription and becomes overwhelmed. Nighy had problems with alcohol. Then, on May 17, 1992, he gave it up. Did the film chime with his experience of addiction? “I’d rather not discuss that, Henry, just because ... it doesn’t work.”
Given his silence on this point, and his general lightness on the screen, it is hard to know how deeply he feels his characters. Could he imagine spending six years learning to conduct, as Bradley Cooper did for Maestro? “If I had to learn some specific thing for a job, yeah, I would learn it,” he says, leaving me not entirely convinced.
Nighy has more films coming up this year: The First Omen, a prequel to horror classic The Omen, released next month, and the Jack Thorne-scripted IVF drama Joy. He’ll also play a psychologist in the thriller series Lazarus, and appear in Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Davud Gilbert’s novel & Sons. “I’ve heard about retirement and I don’t like the sound of it. I like to go to work.”
I start worrying that Nighy lacks vices. “I’m quietly extravagant,” he says. My heartbeat rises. “I buy a lot of socks. I’m the greatest dry-cleaning customer in the world. I eat out every night, because I’m on my own, and why wouldn’t I? I know it’s probably decadent ... I take cabs. I love books.”
But the socks? Nighy cheerfully recalls his penniless youth. “I used to have to wash my socks every night. There were a few squats I lived in, where you had to take the boards off before you could get in the house, because they kept putting them boards up. I’d have one pair of DMS which would go rotten after awhile. They’d start to squeak, so people could hear you coming. Then they’d start to whiff.”
Of all the self-images that Nighy is comfortable with, I’m surprised he chose that one.