‘I think about death 35 times a day’: Bill Nighy on sex, social media – and still being able to manage the stairs
So far, Bill Nighy has been offered a seat on the tube on 10 separate occasions. “Not that I’m counting. But obviously I am.” He snorts. “The worst thing is everyone in the carriage turns to look and see what you say.”
Always a polite decline. “Last week, I was carrying my gym bag and I felt like saying: ‘You know, I’ve just been doing quite vigorous things. And I can actually remain upright for quite long periods of time.’”
He snorts again: the signature Nighy sound, unmistakable as a chiffchaff. It’s the same with stairs, he sighs; he’s forever being steered towards the lift. “The first couple of times, I couldn’t understand it. ‘Are the stairs … unsafe? Oh! Stairs! Am I OK with the stairs? Yeah, stairs are OK. I’m not bad on the stairs, y’know.’”
Does Nighy look in urgent need of a sit-down? Or are people just really keen to offer? Here, after all, is one of the world’s few actual rock star actors. “He has a brand,” says his latest director, Oliver Hermanus. “A singular type of British cool.”
His hangdog sex-god languor remains immaculate, regardless of the squid (Pirates of the Caribbean) or ninny (Emma), naff has-been (Love, Actually) or withered civil servant (his new one, Living) he’s currently playing.
Spend any time in Pimlico and you’re all but guaranteed a sighting. Navy Dunhill suit, Cutler and Gross specs, suave and obliging for the selfies. His appeal was never predicated on plump youth. And, at 72, he’s still whippet-thin: vigorous things, plus a strict regime of restaurant-only dining and a bare fridge.
How did he cope in lockdown? Ah, he smiles. He rented an Airbnb in the Suffolk countryside near his family (ex Diana Quick, their daughter, Mary, her two children) and the woman who ran it asked if he’d like her to cook for him. “I said: ‘I would love you to cook for me … ’”
Small wonder he assumes people leap to their feet at the sight of him because he looks so decrepit. He recently had his cataracts done. “When you remove the bandages, then you see how old you are. I thought: ‘Oh! That’s why people behave so weirdly around me.’ Because I had been living behind, y’know, quite a serious film.”
Again, mostly his own neuroses. He’s long been allergic to his face. No looking at photos, or films, or interviews. “I gave it up because – as a practical thing – I have to go to work. I can’t have all that rolling around in my head. So I don’t keep track. But then occasionally I’ll catch a glimpse of myself. And you go: ‘Jesus, God almighty. Wow.’”
He keels gently in his chair. We’re in Soho and Nighy has water with ice and a fat wedge of lime. He hasn’t drunk alcohol since 17 May 1992 – that hardliving history fuels the louche vibes – and, perhaps to compensate, always seems to style up the mundane.
Shooting The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in India in 2015, he took his own Yorkshire teabags and decanted Marmite into 30 tiny tubs to evade airport security. Behaviour that might seem mad from anyone else, but is transformed by Nighy into the height of aestheticism.
Shooting their new film in Mayfair last year, says co-star Aimee Lou Wood, he “somehow managed to source a table, chairs and beautiful Italian
dinner for us seemingly out of nowhere. There was even a bit of table decoration. We sat eating arrabbiata in the middle of a busy London street while people walked past and waved.”
That film is Living, tailor-made for Nighy by its scriptwriter Kazuo Ishiguro, who asked if he might like to star in a remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. He would; it’s now his first proper shot at an Oscar. Nighy plays Mr Williams, a widower who oversees an office of paper-shufflers in post-war County Hall. A doctor tells him he has stomach cancer and six months to live. So he starts trying to do so, helped by a boozy playwright (Tom Burke) met on a botched suicide trip to the seaside, as well as Wood’s waitress and a sunny civil servant played by Alex Sharp.
What drew Ishiguro to Nighy, the former emails, was “his ability to arouse, seemingly at will, not only an audience’s emotions, but also its affection”. That makes Nighy “unique among his generation”; only Cary Grant and James Stewart are apt comparisons.
For Nighy, the character presented an irresistible challenge: how little can you get away with? Every movement is muted. He speaks in a desiccated whisper.
“I kept waiting for the soundman to come over and say: ‘Bill, I can’t hear a word.’” The Japanese and British share “a very elaborate code of conduct, performing their manners. And a kind of taboo on any public expression of deep emotion – or any emotion at all. I love doing that because I find it very moving. I find it also quite funny that there’s virtually nothing you can say or do. It’s sort of bonkers, obviously.”
Nighy was born in 1949, four years before the film is set. His first memory was getting a Coronation mug at a fete. “That black-and-white footage of kids playing in shorts,” says Nighy. “I was one of those kids.”
Living, he thinks, might be one of those movies that “refer to other movies as much as to real life. When you hear people talking about the 60s, I was there but I don’t recognise anything they say. Because only selected comment persists into the modern world. The way it actually was is entirely different.
“Conspicuously, today, there are other ways of behaving which are the opposite of restraint. But maybe not everybody in 1953 was as restrained as Mr Williams.”
Living is as far up Nighy’s alley as you can get without hitting the next street. He’s an old pro at bureaucrats awakened by girls in cafes. There’s also rain, cigarettes, Westminster, fabulous tailoring (Nighy has always avoided Shakespeare on account of the trousers) and lots about the transformative power of a trilby.
It’s the period in time to which he’s most drawn. Everyone hankers after an age about 60 or 70 years before, he once read. “Sixteenth century monks would complain that the modern world was going to pieces and that 70 years ago it was all fine. It’s how politicians can manipulate people by saying it used to be great. No, it didn’t. It was actually much worse. But there’s a sort of reflective nostalgia.”
Sometimes, that’s harnessed for the bad. At the moment, he thinks, “there’s a wave of reactionary thought, people trying to drag us backwards in time purely for self-advancement. It’s the easiest way to manipulate people: invent a past for which you can have bogus nostalgia and a future which is frightening and scary, largely because there are people of different ethnic origins. They’ve been doing it since I was a kid. The difference is, it’s digitised now.”
Anyway, back to the Blitz: Nighy knows it was horrendous but still hankers after it. “I think it’s to do with romance and sex. It unified people. They put aside any enthusiasm for division because they had bigger fish to fry.”
In fact, that fellow-feeling faded fast – though still a bit slower than it did after the early days of Covid. “How many times did you hear people say: ‘I hope we can hang on to some of this? Isn’t it great to hear the birdsong? To be in a clean environment? I hope people won’t just withdraw from one another again.’ And of course we’ve just pretty much gone back to normal.”
Nighy was raised in Caterham, halfway between Croydon and Crawley, by his mother, Catherine, a psychiatric nurse, and father, Alfred, a garage owner with natty sports jackets. The war was their big topic of conversation. “You were supposed to slip back into your life having seen dreadful, terrible things and been through an enormous amount of trauma.”
Alfred died of a heart attack when Bill was 25. The two men looked sufficiently similar that Catherine (who died in 2003) would go very quiet watching her son on screen. Some of Nighy’s stylings – social as well as sartorial – are emulation. “I did think about my dad making Living, because he was not unlike Mr Williams. He was a very nice person.”
Williams becomes galvanised by a modest project to construct a children’s playground on a bomb site: an 11thhour attempt to be one of the kids get
ting stuck in on the swings, he says, not waiting for their mother on the sidelines.
Nighy was a fan of slides as a child, he says, “quite happy running and playing football. When I reached puberty it got complicated. I made a meal of it. I took it rather hard.” He overheard his mother saying he was shy. “Shy is a word I have difficulty with because I think there’s an enormous amount of vanity involved somewhere. But I aimed to please. I wanted to come top. I was an altar boy. I served mass five times a week.”
Nighy was all set for the seminary, but the call from God failed to materialise, not for lack of listening. Doubts began. “Certain people were gonna apparently burn in everlasting hellfire. People I knew. So you thought: ‘Maybe I should sort of say something?’ I remember asking questions and not getting any answers. And then I started worrying about my hair.”
At 15, he and a friend ran away to the Persian Gulf (“it looked good on the map”) and got as far as Marseilles. “We were very hungry and a bit scared because there were some very strange people on the docks.”
Back in Caterham, he was kicked out of grammar school and taken by his mother to the National Youth Employment Agency. “The bloke there had a big book of jobs and asked me what kind of thing I was interested in. I said: ‘Well, I wanna be an author.’ And my mother put her foot on mine under the desk and pressed down very, very hard, as if to say: ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’ And the bloke said: ‘Well, we don’t have any jobs for authors.’ And I said: ‘Well, I didn’t think you would. I just thought you’d best know.’”
Anyway, he did wangle Nighy work as a messenger boy on the Field magazine, going round posh London hotels changing their editions. “Sometimes they gave me the cab fare. It was all a bit, y’know, marvellous.”
He was less keen on the commute up to Victoria. “I remember thinking: if this is supposed to be my life, you have got to be kidding. This can’t happen. Too many people not saying anything crammed together. Awkward, embarrassing and uncomfortable.”
So, at 17, adventure No 2: to Paris, alone, “to write the great English short story. And I didn’t write a word.” He begged from tourists, was offered sex work but declined citing lack of experience.
Eventually he found his way to the Guildford School of Dance and Drama (“prance and murmur”), from there to rep in Liverpool, and touring the north with the likes of Jonathan Pryce and Julie Walters.
A decade of solid stage and radio work sustained him, just. In 1991, Sunday night serial The Men’s Room – shagging academics – upped his currency. He was in Arcadia and Skylight and Blue/Orange on stage; Lawless Heart, Still Crazy, Underworld, Shaun of the Dead at the cinema.
Love, Actually in 2003 saw another status upgrade. Skylight went to Broadway; so did another David Hare play, The Vertical Hour. On TV: award-winning turns in State of Play, The Lost Prince, Gideon’s Daughter and Page Eight.
Film credits became more prolific and prominent. Lots of big British hits: Pride, About Time, the Dad’s Army remake. Sometimes a bit of a blockbuster: Pirates, Harry Potter. Quiet dramas galore (Hope Gap, The Bookshop, Sometimes Always Never) but nothing with the kind of Oscars cutthrough Living could manage.
Maybe Nighy’s shtick – hard to shift, because it’s genuine – can be a yoke? “I think his brand causes people to lose sight of his skill as an actor,” says Hermanus. He hopes Living “showcases his flexibility, the rigour of his process, and his capacity to deliver a heart-wrenching monologue as well as a twinkly oneliner”.
Every Sunday before the shoot, the director would head to Nighy’s place at 11am “and we would sit in his lounge and pore over the script. Bill would make us some tea. This is when we really bonded – talked about lives, our families and all the performances and films we love, and I would get to listen to the amazing array of music that he listens to – anything from bluegrass to hip-hop. I will remember my Sundays with Bill always.”
Nighy is not a method actor. Another reason lay-people love him is his habit of exploding his own profession. In one Bafta video, he recalls telling a drama student that, on stage, “I can absolutely guarantee you that I’m not feeling anything. I’m at work. I’m a bit busy. I’m a bit pushed. I have to achieve a total of about 15,000 things over about two-and-a-half hours. I can’t be feeling stuff. That I do in my own time.”
He’s catty about colleagues who fail to memorise their lines before rehearsals for fear it might stifle their creativity. Being off-book is a point of principle. “Wandering about saying the lines over and over and over and over so that you can eventually give an impression of spontaneity. That’s the job.”
Nighy talks about prep in the parlance of a footballer or a guitarist – both professions he much admires. Hours of keepy-uppy, endless perfecting the lick.
Ask co-stars about him and the jazz musician allusions flow freely. Burke says Nighy once “humbly suggested his entire oeuvre was based on ‘the double take’. He advocated double taking at: anyone entering in, any new information received, and he may have even pioneered double taking at one’s own private revelations, so a series of thoughts could fission out; exploding into the next one or interrupting the last; bringing something almost Chet Baker-like to actions as simple as entering, sitting down, and shifting to find a comfortable position. His liveness within such technical wizardry is what makes it so special.”
Burke, Wood, Sharp: they all rave about Nighy’s depth and discipline, openness and inclusivity, “gorgeous cheekiness, aliveness and playfulness” (Wood). The sense of letting you in on some magical private joke.
Sharp sends over more than 1,000 words of detailed praise. Sometimes he’d find a book in his trailer with a note saying: “Pertains to what we were talking about at dinner, a good read. Stay loose, baby – Bill”
“To say Bill is a good man is a fantastic understatement,” he writes. “He has helped me in my personal life in big ways.”
At another supper, Nighy told him about “a legendary actor, his senior, who he admired and loved” – and who is, I suspect, Michael Gambon. “He spoke of this man’s kindness and humanity, and how doing the simplest things, like fixing Bill’s tie when it was wonky, showed such kindness and respect for Bill, his junior, that it would fill Bill’s eyes with tears.
“This older actor’s work was of huge inspiration to him, but more than that, the essence of the man’s perspective, capacity for love, and natural inclination to create an equal playing ground with a younger actor, moved
Occasionally I’ll catch a glimpse of myself. And you go: ‘Jesus, God almighty. Wow’
Bill beyond what he could articulate. He said he could never fully express this to him, but hoped he knew. Taking another bite of my food, I nodded, thinking: ‘I hope Bill knows that is exactly how I feel about him.’”
In Living, Williams is revived by the young. Nighy too? Not exactly, he says, then revises. “Thinking about it, I do find it refreshing to work with people of other generations. Older people can be kind of slightly besieged by life, or by the fact of their age.
“And I am unspeakably fortunate, beyond lucky. I don’t have anything I need to be younger for.”
In fact, he shudders, he’d hate it. Social media is “exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want to enumerate my friends. I’m working on less contact, not more.”
He tells me with horror that young people today must act as their own publicist. “Edit and curate and broadcast their own experience. That’s really tough. And if you are inexperienced and it gets combative … no wonder people become unhappy.”
Nighy’s people almost got him on Instagram, with the promise they’d do all the work. “But I pulled out. I just thought: I can’t. One of the things that I would’ve been required to do was to tell people that I’m in a film. I’m never gonna tell people I’m in a film. It’s just never gonna happen.”
At the London premiere of Living, he was asked by red carpet journalists what his favourite scene was. “And I couldn’t remember any of them. Normally, just to be sociable, I’d choose one. But I just didn’t have that kind of energy.
“There are certain PR questions to which there are only PR answers. It’s not lying, but it’s a very edited truth. And if you are in any way a moral creature, that’s probably why it’s sort of enervating. It’s a very particular kind of tiredness not because you’ve been doing anything dishonest, but it’s just not quite normal contact with other human beings.”
He hurriedly adds some qualifiers: it’s a champagne problem. And this isn’t abnormal. “This is nice and I’m not just smooth-talking.”
So I ask him what he would do if a doctor gave him six months. “I have no idea, honestly, Catherine. I’d want to spend time with my family. I might go somewhere distant and beautiful for a bit. But that would be worrying in case you started to, y’know, need some healthcare.”
Might he like to die by the sea, like Williams? He thinks he might. He goes to Aldeburgh quite a lot anyway. “It makes me philosophical, which is what you require sometimes.” The Shetlands could be good, he thinks. He talks briefly about how high a cliff he’d need. “I’d probably want to do it myself, rather than dwindle away in pain.”
Nighy once said he thought about death 12 times a day. He snorts, remembering the amazement. “That was quite a modest assessment. It’s probably more like 35.” Not all doomy, though: mostly whether or not shoes will outlive him.
He drains his water and the ice clinks. Noon with Nighy can feel like 3am with someone else. “And I don’t really believe it,” he says. That he’s going to die? “Yeah. I know it’s gonna happen, but I think maybe at the last minute somebody might make an exception.”
He leans back. “But then again, I sometimes think: I don’t think I can do a lot more of this. I’ve had quite a lot on.” He snorts again and I leave him, prepped for death, having the time of his life.
• Living is released on 4 November. Join the team behind Living, including Kazuo Ishiguro, Aimee Lou Wood and Oliver Hermanus, for a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 1 November. Book tickets here.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. For more information visit www.samaritans.org. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
will yield a seven or tenfold return – depending on which preacher you talk to.
I was working on a memoir about these experiences when I was inundated with social media ads to “Surge Your Life God’s Way”.
Tickets to Life Surge ranged from $52 to $500, and after purchasing the cheapest option, I found myself devoting nine hours of my Saturday to sitting in a packed arena, learning how to “Grow Your Faith to Grow Your Business”, “Change the Marketplace for Christ” and “Build for Tomorrow & Eternity”.
According to Pew, nearly half of evangelical Protestants never attended college, and more than half earn less than $50,000 annually (a third earn less than $30,000). Financial literacy is desperately needed in many of these communities, and while Life Surge offered some pragmatic advice on real estate, stocks and taxes, each speaker employed a litany of culture war rhetoric – prayer is needed in school, the snowflakes of cancel culture are coming for us, Hollywood hates Christians – implying an us v them worldview and fueling an ominous urgency for not only investment, but proselytization.
Life Surge declined “to answer any specific questions” for this story, saying it was “blatantly apparent that [I] and the Guardian have a strong bias against the Christian evangelical community and our values”.
‘Surge your wealth’
Employing a Smothers Brothers style of ribbing each other with sibling rivalry jokes, the Benham brothers blended humor with a call to “surge your wealth” (nearly every speaker worked this phrase into their talks) as a form of Christian duty.
They told the story of HGTV greenlighting their reality show in 2014, only to pull the plug following protests against them for, in their words, “saying politically incorrect things”. According to Right Wing Watch, David Benham led a protest in 2012 to stop, in his words, “homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation” and “demonic ideologies tak[ing] our universities and our public school systems”. Additionally, he protested against plans for an Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York, saying: “The difference between Islam and Christianity: Islam takes life and enslaves it. Christianity lays its life down and sets you free.”
In response to their TV show getting the boot, Jason Benham told the Life Surge crowd: “Sometimes when God gives you a platform it’s not just to stand on, but sometimes to burn on.”
We were told the brothers had the opportunity to continue the show if they’d promise to keep quiet about social issues, but they refused. Similarly, Tim Tebow told a story later that day about rejecting a million-dollar ad deal so he could join the Patriots (which he ultimately did not): “I was willing to make that sacrifice for football, but would I be willing to do that for the Great Commission?”
The retired quarterback wasn’t talking about a sales commission but rather the order Jesus gave to his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations”.
This was the overarching theme of the day: Christianity is under attack in America, cancel culture is silencing us, so God commands you to earn a lot of money (which we’ll teach you to do, via the stock market and real estate) in order to fight the culture war and recruit new believers.
“Why on earth are we not buying Twitter?” asked David Benham. “Why can’t we get our money together and buy Disney, who have been so openminded their brains are falling out? How many of you are sick and tired of seeing the devil take all the influence in this culture?”
The crowd rose to their feet and cheered.
Shortly after this, a flood of beach balls descended from the arena rafters as the crowd danced to uptempo worship music, many with eyes closed and hands waving. I engaged in this emotionally charged ritual every day until I was 20, and a heady mix of dread and euphoria swirled through me as I recalled those days, and the belief that anyone outside of this Pentecostal bubble wasn’t to be trusted.
“We need more Christians doing TV shows and music, because if we’re not filling those jobs we know who will,” said Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson (sans trademark long hair and bandanna), apparently referring to atheist liberals. “We said a prayer at the end of every [Duck Dynasty episode], which was unheard of at the time.”
The notion that secular America can’t be trusted and so “real Americans” need a Christian alternative in all avenues of culture and commerce has been around much longer than even Fox News. For nearly a century evangelicals have been branding their businesses as explicitly Christ-centric, even if the service is something as innocuous as plumbing or furniture restoration.
This presents ample opportunity for claims of religious persecution in any conflict – as in the gay wedding cake debacle Colorado endured in 2014 – as well as a devoted fanbase, who are taught to be suspicious of the secular competition.
“I could learn finance from an atheist, but getting it from a Christian gives it a relatability, and takes it to a deeper level,” says Jacob Hayward, a Life Surge attendee from Denver.
While Donald Trump’s name was notably absent from the event, each speaker seasoned their presentations with a variety of Fox News touchstones: everything from spineless American parents to Biden causing inflation to legalized marijuana.
“I may offend some of you, if you’re part of that cancel culture, you’re a snowflake fruit cup and everything upsets you,” said James Smith, a real estate educator who used his investment advice as opportunities for conservative commentary, speculating that Dick’s Sporting Goods stock is down because they pulled assault-style guns from their shelves, or that digital currency is a bad investment because of government surveillance.
“Did you know that a couple weeks ago the president signed an executive order allowing America to go on digital currency?” Smith asked the crowd. “Coincide that with 87,000 new IRS agents. Do you know why they did that? For surveillance of you economically.”
“The United States government wants us dependent on them right now so they can get your votes,” Jason Benham had said earlier in the day.
A simple message
Hysterical fear of a coming socialist takeover of America was at the heart of both the conservative movement of Barry Goldwater and the apocalyptic fever of evangelicals. Throughout the 90s, our Left Behind rapture novels and televangelists like Pat Robertson linking the Book of Revelation with the day’s headlines kept us in a constant state of panic, ready to blindly follow any conservative huckster with a surefire escape plan.
In addition to fears of Armageddon, the existential fear that you’re spending too much time at work and too little with your family is a common tactic among evangelicals preaching finance. Multilevel marketing companies (often pejoratively referred to as “pyramid schemes”) like AmWay are often founded by evangelicals, and use churches as recruitment centers, offering the opportunity to “be your own boss” and have more family time. (This was a common refrain at Life Surge as well.)
Believers are often encouraged to go deep into debt for these schemes, told to employ a “fake it till you make it” approach, growing their businesses and living a flashy lifestyle long before any profit comes in.
“The evangelical community has been one of the more susceptible groups that have been so infected by this and still is today,” says Robert FitzPatrick, author of Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of Multi-Level Marketing. “It spreads through churches, and is presented with this moral authority, you are told not to argue with anybody who criticizes it, they are non-believers … And in the end, only a fraction of one per cent of people who get into multilevel marketing ever turn a profit.”
It’s the simplicity of the message that often captivates people like my dad, who invested not only in AmWay but in other MLMs like vitamin supplements, phone cards, gold, or phone cards with gold in them.
With these presentations, and at Life Surge, we are inundated with success stories of simple folks who went from pauperdom to prosperity, thanks to “one simple trick”. At one point at Life Surge we were presented with an algorithm that predicts stock trends – for “only a dollar a day” we could simply click “buy” or “sell” based on the program’s recommendations.
Whether subtly or overtly, this was the takeaway from every speaker’s message: that opportunities for wealth are all around us, at all times, in the stock market, real estate or internet businesses, and so climbing out of poverty is easy, having more time to spend with your family is easy, raising the funds to fully support a ministry is easy, if you’re not a sinner and are armed with the right financial knowledge and tools.
And at the end of each presentation, such knowledge and tools were offered to Life Surge ticket holders at the cost of $900 – no, wait, $500 – no, wait! Sign up now and only $99! – by hundreds of black-clad volunteers walking through the audience with clipboards.
I did not purchase the followup classes, feeling that $52 for nine hours of Christian right economics (and a Chick-Fil-A box lunch!) was sufficient to give me the Life Surge experience.
While there was significantly less materialism (only a few mentions of sports cars and mansions) than the AmWay or Oral Roberts seminars of years past, and a good deal more practical financial strategy than Tammy Faye Bakker ever offered, the Life Surge call to earn wealth in the name of spreading the gospel is just as insidious and manipulative a grift as any in the history of evangelical conmen.
It communicates that poverty is a reflection of sin, not circumstance. If attendees fail to become wealthy enough to fund missionaries, or Christian entertainment, or Christian politicians, it is explained, they will fail to convert potentially thousands to Christianity, damning them to an eternity of torture in hell.
For desperate people simply looking for an opportunity to keep their heads above water, that is a heavy weight to bear.
This story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project