Bill Nighy reveals a life possessed by Bob Dylan, altered by ageing rocker Billy Mack and enlivened by his new Blitz-era movie.
Bill Nighy enters the room, all sharp elbows, navy suit and black-framed glasses. He approaches like an express train of geniality before folding his tall frame into a chair and pondering his next interviewer with a wry grin, a sidelong look and the occasional twinkle when his deadpan delivery induces laughter.
It’s not the 67-year-old British actor’s first time here. In 2008, he spent some months in Auckland shouting at werewolves by day and frequenting the city’s eateries by night. That was when he was filming his third Underworld movie, Rise of the Lycans, in which he glowered for England as the ancient boss vampire Viktor. “I had a really nice time and I am not just saying that. I think I ate in every restaurant in Auckland.”
Viktor, though, is only his second most famous undead character after Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean series that he performed with a large digital cephalopod as a face. Those roles may seem like an odd fit for an actor whose default setting is understatement. “But I like genre. I loved being a vampire and I love playing the squid – once I got over the computer pyjamas that they put me in, which were deeply embarrassing.”
Since his breakthrough role as creaky rocker Billy Mack in 2003’s enduring Love, Actually, Nighy has put himself about a bit. He sees the evidence of that among the fans asking for selfies. “If they are male between the age of 13 and 35, it’s Shaun of the Dead. Nine to 90, Pirates of the Caribbean. If they are female, it is generally Love, Actually. It can be male as well. If it is my age, it is [The Best Exotic] Marigold Hotel. So, I have sort of got it covered,” he chuckles.
Last month, he was part of the Love, Actually 10-minute televised sequel for the Red Nose Day charity campaign: “It was a nice footnote to the whole thing … the big news is I can still get into those trousers.”
This time in Auckland, though, is a flying visit. Though, as well as talking up his new movie, Their Finest, a World War II-set drama in which he plays a haughty star of the silver screen, he’s boosted the local book retail economy. He’s bought the new non-fiction account of Ernest Hemingway’s supposed role as a Russian spook, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy, as well as Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea and a deluxe edition of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.
Nighy’s bibliophilia has its downsides when it comes to lugging all those volumes home. But he’s not going digital. Given an e-reader, he re-gifted it smartly.
Still, he’s happy to have the complete works of a certain Nobel Prize winner for literature on his phone. Nighy is as big a Bob Dylan-ophile as he is a bibliophile. He’s got his new album, Triplicate, on order “on every format possible” and has tickets to every night of Dylan’s forthcoming three nights at London’s Palladium theatre.
Books and Bob, he says, were the making of him. Nighy first happened upon Dylan in a newspaper when he was 14. “It said, ‘Genius folk singer Bob Dylan left London today after a successful gig at the 100 Club.’ I had never seen the word genius written down and I didn’t have any interest in folk singing, but I went to Potters Music Shop in Croydon and said, ‘Do you have anything by Bob Dylan?’
“It was 10 minutes before he became the most recognised person on Earth. They said, ‘Never heard of him, try under D,’ and I got the first album. It kind of possessed me.
“I left home on the strength of the first Bob Dylan album. I had literally thrown my suitcase out the window. I ran away from home. It was a combination of The First Forty-Nine Stories of Ernest Hemingway and Dylan. That’s what did for my family life.”
Nighy went to acting school, then began an itinerant stage career – “I was a mess, really, in those days.” It was odd that he gravitated to acting, he says, given his working-class upbringing. “Nobody knew about being an actor or anything when I was a kid, and certainly not around our way. The only thing you thought about was the theatre. You didn’t think about being in a film or anything. It was basically a middle-class activity. When I was young, if you put me with anybody who was university educated, it used to make me quite uncomfortable, which was my problem, not theirs. It was my feeling of inadequacy.”
He found his feet in the mid to late 1970s at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, an establishment where many of the political plays of Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell took their first bow and that incubated the acting talents of the likes of Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce and Pete Postlethwaite. “Suddenly it was a whole new thing. They were doing plays about the local community and they were democrats; things I could recognise.”
Nighy says he would have been happy to have remained a journeyman theatre actor and continues to tread the boards.
Increasingly, in the late 80s and 90s, the British screen industry came calling, and eventually Hollywood, in need of ancient vampires and tentacle-faced pirate captains, did too. You imagine that these days his agent might get calls from producers saying they want a “Bill Nighy type”. “I am kind of thrilled to think there might be a Bill Nighy type,” he says, laughing. “I suspect she’s got some young man on the books somewhere. Or in a cupboard somewhere waiting.”
He’s certainly a very Bill Nighy type in Their Finest. The movie, starring Gemma Arterton as an aspiring screenwriter, is directed by Lone Scherfig (An Education). Set mostly in wartime London during the Blitz, it follows the production of a Dunkirk drama designed to keep morale up.
Nighy’s waspish thespian Ambrose Hillard is cast as the drunken captain of an evacuation boat in the movie within a movie. “They were looking for someone to play a pompous self-absorbed actor in his declining years and they came to me,” he quips, not for the first time.
Ambrose is a reminder that Nighy, a late bloomer in his screen career, has made a speciality of faded characters. “You seem to get offered a certain kind of role and I am very happy playing people who are disabled by self-consciousness … I like playing people who are up against it.”
Their Finest is his second World War II foray in a row after last year’s movie rehash of Dad’s Army. The war figured large in his parents’ life, with his father an RAF mechanic and his mother working nights. He heard many home-front war stories, growing up. “I have a kind of nostalgia for the Blitz … people are drawn to the idea that life was simplified by the fact that you had one major concern – to stay alive. All the other conflicts were unplugged for a time. It was a sexy time and a romantic time.”
The new film also marks Nighy’s third on-screen singing performance. He delivers a sweet rendition of Wild Mountain Thyme, though he recommends the Van Morrison version over his. The song – which Dylan has played, too – gets Nighy the post-war baby boomer back to his folk roots. But there are no intentions to do a Bill Nighy album. Not even Bill sings Bob?
“Oh please. Well, maybe, before I die. Under an assumed name.”
This article was first published in the April 22, 2017 issue of the New Zealand Listener.