“I’ve got a beard, as you might have noticed. You don’t have to say anything. It’s for work.”
That’s how Bill Nighy – actor, king of self-deprecation – greets me, hand outstretched, at The Goring Hotel, a few minutes walk from Buckingham Palace on the sort of chilly London morning you can first sense the festive season fluttering into view. It’s a moment so quintessentially BN, it almost feels like a parody. Well, the beard looks great, I tell him. And it does: a snowstorm of white hair beneath his sharp cheekbones and thick-rimmed glasses. “A woman in the street just looked at it and said, ‘Oh, no,’” he responds, deadpan. “I told her I’m playing a man who’s falling apart, and she said, ‘Well, it’s working,’ which was, you know, thoughtful.”
In real life, Nighy is the antithesis of falling apart. We’ve met in a golden corner of the hotel’s tea room, at a table he frequents so regularly that the waiter pops over to tell us he worries when Nighy isn’t there. The 74-year-old Londoner is exactly as you’d expect: sharp, charming and unshakeably dry; peppering our conversation with particular opinions, all delivered in that luxuriously slow drawl. (His take on leggings? “They make me sort of melancholy.” Rolling your suit jacket sleeves up? “The violent opposite of chic.” Book clubs? “My perfect nightmare. You have to explain why you like something, then to have somebody go, ‘No, you’re wrong.’”)
No wonder Nighy has transcended movie star status to become something of an international treasure, a universal fun uncle, as adored for his wit and man-about-town eccentricities as he is for his performances in beloved films such as Love Actually and Pride, or 2022’s Living, with its screenplay adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro, his Oscar-nominated study in understatement. And that’s before you even get to his sparkling turns on stage, for which he’s been nominated for a Tony and an Olivier award. Nighy’s superpower is empathy, his collaborators say. “He just cares so deeply about people,” Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred alongside him in Blue/Orange in 2000 and The Man Who Fell To Earth in 2022, says. “Everyone feels the warmth of his huge heart and infinite charisma. He can’t hide it – and it shines in every performance.”
Carey Mulligan, his costar in a 2014 and 2015 production of Skylight, says: “When I told him I would be embarking on our Broadway run together, about 15 weeks pregnant with my first child, he didn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, he made it a joint adventure, finding ways to conceal my bump, providing that extra bolstering I needed on harder shows, singing show tunes to the baby during warm up. I love him and I’ll love him forever.”
Nighy’s gift for compassion is on full display in his latest project, Joy. Premiering on Netflix in November, it follows the three pioneering British medical scientists – biologist Robert Edwards, nurse Jean Purdy and surgeon Patrick Steptoe – who developed the first successful IVF treatment in the late 1970s. It’s a cosy, Sunday-afternoon take on a world-shifting innovation: the genesis of a procedure that, alongside other assisted reproductive technologies, has seen more than 12 million babies born worldwide since. Today, around 55,000 women have IVF in the UK each year, leading to thousands of births. Nighy plays Steptoe, the obstetrician and gynaecologist who perfected the keyhole surgery used to extract eggs. He’s joined by Happy Valley’s James Norton as Edwards and Last Night in Soho’s Thomasin McKenzie as Purdy, in a production that depicts the fierce opposition the scientists faced from the media, religious groups, and a sceptical medical establishment.
For Nighy, it was Jean Purdy’s story that drew him to the production. “She was, in the time-honoured tradition, airbrushed out of the whole thing – forgotten or dismissed because she was a woman,” he says. While Edwards got a Nobel Prize for his work in 2010, Purdy’s name wasn’t even on the memorial plaques celebrating the innovation until 2015, some 30 years after her death. So little had been recorded of her contribution that writers Rachel Mason and Jack Thorne found research challenging.
McKenzie, who plays Purdy, says: “We wanted to bring some of that attention to her, to bring her some of the recognition that she rightfully deserves.” McKenzie loved working with Nighy. “He was so kind and generous. I think he sees a lot of beauty in the world, and in sharing the books he reads and his music. He showed up to set every day in one of his beautiful suits.”
Ah, yes, Bill and his suits. Today’s is bespoke grey P Johnson worn over an impossibly white shirt. “I’m a dry-cleaning maniac,” he says. “If something hangs still for more than six minutes, it gets dry-cleaned. I told my dry-cleaner, ‘I must be your best customer.’ He replied, ‘Yes, apart from hotels.’” (He doesn’t actually own a washing machine.)
His vast collection of two-pieces began accidentally, with freebies taken from the costume departments of early TV gigs. “I did all the stuff that young actors do, I lived in squats… and I lived in suits. I didn’t have any other clothes. I’d go to rehearsals and roll around on the floor in Yves Saint Laurent.”
Eventually, Nighy’s penchant for tailoring had him declared a “menswear god” by GQ. In January, he sat front row at the Dior show in Paris, though he says he finds fashion shows “exposing”. (“I feel not beautiful enough and too old.”) He thinks there’s a slight public misconception about his style. “Somehow, it’s been conflated with an idea of Englishness, like I’m some Mayfair, pocket-handkerchiefs and matching-socks kind of guy, which I’m not.”
For the record, Nighy’s more of a Pimlico guy, though his style lands somewhere between Paris and Rome. He lives around the corner from The Goring but is rarely at home. He’s often spotted by Londoners dashing around Soho bookshops or reading on the Tube – a kind of unofficial ambassador for English lit and Zones 1 to 3. It means he regularly ends up chatting with fans, something he enjoys – although hen parties can be a problem, “Because I’m this old bloke who took his clothes off in Love Actually, I’m [seen as] safe but a bit leery or something.” He leans right back in a green armchair. “I was once chased down the street in New Zealand by girls dressed in bin liners and tiaras, screaming, ‘Get your kit off!’ I had to run.”
Does he ever eat at home? “No, I never do. I don’t know how to use the hob.” Look in his fridge at any given moment and you’re likely to find just six bottles of Perrier (“I like the glass ones”) and a pint of semi-skimmed milk (“I can’t bear larger milk containers; they just depress me”). He mainlines tea – “exclusively Yorkshire Gold”. On a good morning, he’ll have his first cup and then go to a café for breakfast and to read. (Éric Vuillard’s The War of the Poor and this week’s New Yorker are both in reach as he speaks.) So regular are his visits that the cafés near his home keep Yorkshire Gold and Marmite behind the counter just for him.
“Nearly always, I’m on my own because I’m unattached,” he says. He prefers a quiet life. “The best thing about getting older is that you can decline [events], and people don’t question it. You can go home, get a book, and it is” – he pauses for dramatic effect – “delicious.” Although there is a social engagement he always makes time for; an annual trip to “festival of cheerful filth” Julian Clary’s panto at the Palladium with playwright David Hare, fashion designer Nicole Farhi, theatre director Jonathan Kent and artist Liza Campbell. “We’ve formed a loose association called the Panto Club. I’m taking Judi Dench in January.”
A cortado arrives. “I thought you were a tea man,” I say. “I am. This is a bad idea. I shouldn’t drink it.” He pushes it to the side. “I do this with coffee quite a lot. Twenty years ago, I would have drunk four large espressos before this interview to make myself more interesting. As if any substance is going to make you more interesting; in fact, it makes you less interesting.”
Over the last few decades, Nighy has undergone something of a health transformation and now heads to a personal trainer in north London three times a week. It’s his second attempt at getting fit. “Years ago, I was given free membership to some posh thing. I went once. This young man inducted me, and I couldn’t get out of bed the next day. I sent him flowers saying, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’” This time around, the approach is gentler. “I just want to be able to stand up straight and reach for the tallest book or something.” He’s the only person working out in north London, he says, who dry-cleans his gym T-shirts.
Things were, once, a tad wilder: in the 1970s, aged 20-something, he used to head for a dance at R&B club Chauffeurs in Liverpool hours before it got busy. “That was great, because no one was looking at you and because you’d have the dance floor to yourself.” He grins. “The DJ used to play ‘Let’s Get It On’ by Marvin Gaye as I was walking down the stairs. I really felt like I’d made it.”
Living in Liverpool was “coming of age” stuff for Nighy. Raised by his Irish nurse mother and garage-owner father in Caterham, Surrey, he worked as a market trader and newspaper assistant before he joined the city’s legendary political Everyman theatre company in 1974. “I walked into a very, very sort of extraordinary place,” he says. “The resident writers were Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale. They were still teachers. I just tried to keep my head down.”
Much of his time there was spent performing in local pubs with the likes of Pete Postlethwaite and Julie Walters as part of outreach wing Vanload. “Julie would do a Shirley Bassey number where occasionally she’d sit on [a punter’s] knee and drink their pint for them while she was singing,” he says. Walters recalls him as a “tall, skinny blond, James Dean-type bloke with massive charisma”.
“We spent a lot of time singing the blues, ‘Johnny B Goode’ being a favourite, with him on his mouth organ and me harmonising,” she says, remembering a time the two of them borrowed “without permission” the Everyman van and went off to Southport for the day. “He was great fun, naughty and spontaneous. I am thrilled for his success and proud of him.”
It was Richard Curtis’s yuletide juggernaut Love Actually that turned Nighy from a theatre stalwart – known for working with titans such as Harold Pinter – to a worldwide star. He’s appeared in more than 70 movies now – from Shaun of the Dead to Harry Potter to Emma. He even fills in for Iggy Pop as a presenter on BBC Radio 6, a dream gig for an obsessive music-sharer.
Theatre remains one of his greatest talents, though. He fondly recalls performing Pinter’s Betrayal at the Almeida Theatre in London in 1991. “It was a big thing, because we got laughs,” he says. “There was a time when people watched Harold Pinter as if they were in church.” Another standout memory is making his Broadway debut in 2006’s The Vertical Hour. “Nobody really warned me that your dressing room, on opening night, suddenly becomes jam-packed with people, like on a Tube train. And I turned as much as I could turn, and I looked straight into David Bowie’s face, and I just went into this sort of gush. You could see he was disappointed. You know, that his music had ‘meant a lot to me over the years’ didn’t feature high on his list of things to worry about. He just wanted to chat about the play.”
There’s an impish, cheeky quality to Nighy, especially when he’s building to a punchline. His jokes are often at his own expense – a combination of Anglo-Irish modesty and a lifelong struggle with confidence. He dislikes his slight body, admitting he feels like “There’s a sort of failure in terms of design.” For years he felt romance and desire weren’t things that would be on the agenda for him. “Any kind of idea of myself as a romantic figure, or as desirable, I found that impossible to deal with.” For most of his career he’s found work to be stress-inducing too. “I remember, [in 1985], standing behind a theatre set waiting to go on with Anthony Hopkins and him saying, ‘How do you feel?’ I said, ‘I’m terrified’. He said, ‘So am I.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t it get any better?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s fucking worse.’”
Was Hopkins right? “It’s true – the expectation becomes so much greater. Particularly on stage, you might be the reason somebody’s paid these ridiculous prices, you know, they might have paid a hundred quid to come and sit there.”
Nighy’s otherwise enjoying getting older. He delights in being a granddad to the children of his daughter Mary, 40, a filmmaker, from his relationship with actor Diana Quick. He’d been weighing up moving to Paris but stayed in the UK to spend more time with them. “I spoil them until they can hardly take it any more,” he says. “The fridge is just full of sugar because that’s my job.”
What does he think about the world his grandkids are growing up in? He pauses. “I’m not sure. I don’t regret growing up in a non-digital world, and I feel for them that they have to live in one,” he says. He still thinks London’s “the greatest city” despite all the phone theft and chain restaurants it’s now home to. England, on the other hand, he’d rather not talk about. Apart from anything, “I’m now officially Irish. I have an Irish passport. I remain in Europe.”
He leans into the recorder, telling me how he feels angered by “people who manipulate the public along racial lines for no purpose other than their own self-advancement. I don’t think anybody needs the names explained to them, do they? I think they all shine in the dark.” With Joy in mind, he’s seen how some rightwing politicians in the US are trying to use old-fashioned fears about IVF as “another way of manipulating people”. It makes him proud to have worked on the film. “Now people get to see a responsible, faithful account of the events themselves, rather than any kind of spin that might have been put on everything over the years.”
As for what’s next? He’s working on & Sons, a family drama from David Gilbert (the role he grew the beard for), and 500 Miles, about two brothers running away to find their estranged grandfather. Would he return to the stage? “I might be drawn back by a political farce requiring constant double takes and bumping into doors in a decent lounge suit.” He’s ready for a change of pace, though. “I was scrolling Netflix the other day, and I saw a film I’m in. I clicked on it reflexively, and it gave me five other suggestions, all about people dying,” he says. “I think I’ve done enough dying.”
He’s long joked that he’d love his final showbiz act to be an action franchise and he’s begun to take the idea seriously. “All I’d need is a slight superpower,” he says, smirking. “If I’m going to die, I want it to be in a hail of gunfire or jumping out of a plane.”
It’s perhaps not the future one would imagine for the man sitting in front of me; the one gathering up his New Yorker and his book. But Nighy never did what was expected, I think, as he bids me farewell and heads off into the crisp city morning, pin sharp, no doubt in search of his next cup of tea. It’s no wonder we love him so much.
Joy is on Netflix now