On paper, the long-awaited film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an unlikely thinking-woman’s crumpet-fest. John Malkovich, Alan Rickman and Bill Nighy, all in one movie.

Except it turns out that Malkovich, in bottle-bottom specs, plays a repulsive baddie called Humma Kavula who is nothing but a torso on weird robot legs, and Rickman doesn’t actually appear at all, since he is just the voice of Marvin, the paranoid android. Thank goodness Bill Nighy is rather dashing as Slartibartfast, the planet designer who – as every nerd knows – wins an award for creating the twiddly bits around the Norwegian fjords.

In a long, greased-back wig and majestic hooded fur robe, Nighy could be the bass player in a pomp rock band. Even as an intergalactic architect there’s something of the old rocker about Nighy. “Billy Connolly said I had rock’n’roll legs,” he says, stretching them out long and languidly, hands in the pockets of his beautiful Dunhill suit. “In the Seventies, you needed legs you could tie a message to. And I have them, apparently.”

Nighy is often asked which band he used to be in. The

confusion lies in his having twice played raddled rock stars: the Bowie-esque, platform-heeled lead singer in Still Crazy and his movie-stealing performance as Billy Mack in Love Actually. But the real reason is something more fundamental: like Marianne Faithfull, Iggy Pop or Keith Richards, Nighy, 55, has the air of having partied to the very edge of self-destruction, pulled back and acquired a little wisdom without forfeiting any cool.

In person, he looks, oddly, somewhat like Michael Heseltine, the same mane and colouring; but Nighy is more pinched, less lustrous – an old lion, but a moth-eaten one. Yet there is elegance in his languid 6ft 2in frame: he moves gorgeously and wears clothes very, very well. A suit at all times. Once a mod, always a mod, he says. “I aspired to what they call ‘top mod-ness’, which basically meant a suit and Ravel loafers and Madras jackets and Fred Perry shirts. There was a period of my life where I couldn’t leave the house because

I didn’t have the right jeans. It was a quest and I was devout.”

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