‘I used to feel uneasy in the company of the middle-class’
As he stars in a new Agatha Christie drama, Bill Nighy talks to Chris Harvey about LSD, mortality and those Anna Wintour rumours…
The acid test of my interview with Bill Nighy comes quite early. We’re discussing his performance in Illuminatus! at the National Theatre – an epic nine-hour-long production that opened the Cottesloe auditorium in 1977 – and I mention an account I once read that suggested the actors had all been tripping on LSD.
What was it like to perform on acid, I ask. “I might claim the Fifth,” the actor replies. “I can’t remember, not surprisingly.”
He continues: “This is an opportunity for me to passionately and sincerely say that I regret any moodaltering chemical that I ever introduced into my system, because it postponed the most fabulous time in my life in terms of work and creativity.
“And the idea that it is in any way linked to creativity is a myth that we need to dismantle on a daily basis, because it persists.”
He says it slightly as though he is reading from a prepared statement. Does he believe it? “I’m sorry?” he says, surprised but with more than a hint of steeliness. “Why would you say that?”
It was the way he framed it, I explain. “No, no, no. It’s there,” he says, tapping the table in front of my recorder. “You’ve got it there.”
It’s late autumn, and we’re in a London hotel. Nighy has recently finished shooting the lavish Agatha Christie adaptation Ordeal by Innocence for the BBC’S showpiece Boxing Day drama. He spent most of the summer “in a big house in Scotland where it rained most of the time” with an ensemble cast that included Anna Chancellor and Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson.
As is well known now, the drama didn’t air at Christmas. One of the younger cast members, Ed Westwick, was accused of rape in a Facebook post in November, swiftly followed by further allegations, all of which he denies, and the programme was pulled. But the BBC subsequently made the decision to reshoot 35 scenes involving Westwick with a new actor, Christian Cooke (at a cost of up to £2 million, shared between the BBC and production company Mammoth Screen) and the first of three episodes finally airs this Sunday, three months later than originally planned.
One of the actors had a new haircut and another a suntan but they all made themselves available for the reshoot, says the director Sandra Goldbacher. “Bill works non-stop, but he gave us five days,” she says. “He was so generous. He did one four or five-hour scene where he was giving his lines off camera to the rest of the cast when someone could have stood in for him.”
Nighy has appeared in a Christie adaptation before, the film Thirteen at
Dinner in 1985, alongside Peter Ustinov and Faye Dunaway. He remembers that they gave him “quite a lot of money… mistook me for someone else, I think, it was one of those particular jobs where you think, do they know who I aren’t?”
The easy humour is as distinctive of Nighy as one of his dark-blue suits. There’s something, too, in the way that he self-corrects and edits as he talks, reconstructing whole sentences sometimes, just to replace a single word. He can shift gear rapidly, though, to be direct and passionate. When we talk about the late Ken Campbell, for instance, the director of Illuminatus!,
I ask him if he is still influenced by Campbell’s improvisational approach. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says. “Ken would roll over in his grave if he heard the word improvisational linked with his work. He absolutely did not, as he might say, f--- around with anything as namby pamby as improvisation. Every single word came from a writer.
“Improvisation,” he says, “is writing standing up, so you have to be a writer [to do improvisation], and guess what? Very few people are.”
Nighy once dreamt of being a writer himself; he even thought of becoming a journalist because his hero Ernest Hemingway had been one. He and a friend at school once made a break for the Persian Gulf so that he could write about the experience, before getting hungry and scared when they pitched up on the docks in Marseille: “There were some very shaky looking guys and I got nervous.” He flunked school – not because he was a rebel, he says, “I was very eager to please… I just used to sit and look out the window and passionately long to be anywhere else.”
He’s working class. His mother was a psychiatric nurse; his father had been a chimney sweep, before managing a garage. (He died when Nighy was still a young man.) These days, he’s the epitome of urbane sophistication. I wonder if it gives him an identity crisis. “It ought to, oughtn’t it, but it doesn’t. I mean, I know that I’ve sort of made the middle classes… when I was young I would feel very uneasy in the company of the middle class, anyone who was university educated, and possibly the rich.” Now, he says, “I’m quite comfortable wherever you put me.”
It was a girlfriend who suggested he go to drama school and, although he was still planning to be a writer, he kept getting acting jobs. He was part of Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre company with Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite during its Seventies heyday and appeared in several notable National Theatre productions, including plays by Howard Brenton and David Hare in the Eighties.
He began appearing on TV, too, in the Eighties, but it was his role as a womanising academic in The Men’s
Room in 1991 that first conferred him sex symbol status. How did that feel? “I’ve never thought it,” he says. “What man does? I think you’d have to be mad. Maybe there are men like that. I’ve certainly never been one.”
Nighy’s 27-year relationship with actress Diana Quick ended in 2008; their daughter is 33-year-old actress and filmmaker Mary Nighy. When I ask about the abiding rumours that he and
Vogue editor Anna Wintour are an item, he responds with a well-rehearsed: “I could answer that question but that might involve your readers in something fast approaching gossip and I know they would never forgive me.”
His career took flight in the Noughties. He won Baftas for Love,
Actually and State of Play, appeared in blockbusters such as Pirates of the
Caribbean, made the Worricker spy trilogy with David Hare, gained a Tony nomination for Skylight on Broadway, working relentlessly and making good choices.
I ask him if he thinks it would be harder for him to make it as an actor now, coming from his background? He’s scathing about the student loan system and the cost of going to drama school: “How the idea of starting the young in debt ever got past the first drunken person who suggested it is one of the more breathtaking things I consider about the way things are now. I don’t mind where anybody went to school or however much money their parents have – acting’s a primary art and no one should be excluded, including anyone who can’t pay the exorbitant fees at drama schools.”
He’s talked in the past about a fear of mortality. He was asked if he ever thought about death and picked a random number – about 12 times a day. “I think it’s probably much more than that,” he says. “I don’t just think, oh my body’s going to decompose and my eyeballs will dissolve. Sometimes you’ll be looking round the house and you’ll think, oh, I better save that for my daughter, you know. I was walking down the street yesterday and the evening was absolutely enchanting, and you do think then, I’m gonna die and there won’t be evenings like this.” It makes him determined not to miss out on anything that is attractive about being alive: laughter, friends, family…
What about an Oscar to go with his Baftas and his Golden Globe for
Gideon’s Daughter? “No, they can cross me off the list, I don’t want anything. I remember sitting in a café some years ago saying there’s nothing left to want, everything now is gravy, as Raymond Carver would have called it. From now on, it’s just bonus.”
Ordeal by Innocence is on BBC One on Easter Sunday at 9pm
‘That might involve your readers in something approaching gossip, and they’d never forgive me’