Bill Nighy has such serious modesty that when you meet him it is almost as if
there has been some administrative error and you are talking to the wrong
person someone who is not famous, has no cult following, has never starred
on the Broadway stage with Julianne Moore, let alone acted with Johnny Depp
in Pirates of the Caribbean. If you accept that this self-effacement
is not one of those classy English affectations of the kind Hugh Grant
characters specialise in, it is very disarming. The fact is he never really
thought he would be in this situation, professionally; like the many
halting, diffident Englishmen he portrays, he seems to have done little to
try and bring it about. Surely this can't be the case.
The general assumption is that the 57-year-old actor started getting truly
well-known when he played Billy Mack, the spent rock star in the 2003 film Love
Actually. He had actually - been around for about 25 years as a very
respected, constantly employed actor, first on the stage and then on TV, but
it was his arrival in the other England of Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis
that began to make a household face of his warily handsome features.
When that film came out his already numerous admirers were aware of having
seen him play a similar role, but a bigger and better one, in the 1998 film Still
Crazy. Here he was Ray Simms, the leonine but mangy lead singer of
Strange Fruit, a dead Seventies band bidding for resurrection. It was, like
the group it portrayed, an enormous commercial flop. Unlike the group, which
was always courting death by dysfunction, the film deserved better, not
least because of Nighy's performance, a magnificent blend of swagger and
bathos.
In those roles as raddled stars, he was what could be called dangerously
convincing. So much so that you half expect to find someone with the strut
of Robert Plant and the diet of Keith Richards. His capacity for entering
the souls of such creatures is one of the qualities that attracted Brian
Gibson, the director of Still Crazy and one of a few people in the
business Curtis and the playwright David Hare are others to whom Nighy
acknowledges a debt of gratitude. "Brian went out on a limb for me,"
he says. "It meant everything. It's a Catch 22. You can't play the lead
role in a movie until you've played the lead role in a movie. There are
landmarks through your career, even though you're the only person who
chronicles them, privately. When Richard wrote Love Actually, he and
Mary Selway [the casting director, who died in 2004], decided to put me in.
That film must be the most graphic example, because more people saw me in
that than in anything else."
Since then he seems to have become required casting for characters in whom the
civil war between outward composure and inner turbulence is raging. He was
the stepfather in Shaun of the Dead, a man virtually disabled by
middle-class anxiety; in The Girl in the Café he was Lawrence, a
government official similarly hobbled by shyness; in Notes on a Scandal he
was Cate Blanchett's cuckolded husband, all twitchy with abused tolerance.
On TV he was the newspaper editor Cameron Foster in Paul Abbott's drama
serial, State of Play, and the lead in Gideon's Daughter by
Stephen Poliakoff, playing a disaffected spin doctor for the government.
Most recently he has been Oliver, a reclusive doctor hostile to the war in
Iraq, in David Hare's new Broadway play, The Vertical Hour. By all
accounts Nighy, hunted and febrile, outclassed not only his co-star Julianne
Moore, four times an Oscar nominee, but also the play itself. Ben Brantley,
theatre critic of The New York Times, thought he mopped the floor
with both.
Huge global audiences have now seen him in Pirates of the Caribbean
films, even though some might not have realised at once that it was him they
were looking at. In the second Pirates film, Dead Man's Chest and in
the imminent third, At World's End, he plays Davy Jones, the
human-shaped monster with a squid's body for a head and tentacles for a
beard. He has become one of a select British boarding party on the
Pirates' set, alongside Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley, Mackenzie Crook,
Jack Davenport and Tom Hollander. Ironic that an actor with such a nuanced
range of expressions should have devolved his facial vocabulary to computer
technology.
When I come out with my low-tech question about how long it takes to make up,
expecting at least three hours, like Michael Crawford in The Woman in White,
he explains gleefully that it takes him less time than anyone else.
"They point six cameras at you and make you pull every expression you are
capable of. Then they sample these. They take you into a mystery truck full
of screens at one end and a podium at the other. You stand on this and there
are these X-ray machines circling your whole body. Then they say, thank you,
we now have your data." A significant fact of that damaged rocker, Ray
Simms in Still Crazy, was that much of the damage had been
self-administered. By the opening of the film, he has given up drugs and
drink. Likewise Bill Nighy, who had his last alcoholic drink 15 years ago.
He agrees there is almost certainly a link between his abstinence and the
development of his career. In fact, he puts it more strongly than this,
saying: "The central fact of my life is that I have an unhealthy
relationship with mood-altering chemicals, liquid or otherwise." He
says it took him a while until he was 42 to realise he "had
no brakes" when it came to booze and dope.
All this he recounts with a sort of dogged delight, as if reminding himself
quite solemnly that he really has kicked these lethal habits, but at the
same time rejoicing in the fact that he has. He continues, slow and
measured: "The most significant thing that ever happened to me was when I
stopped. I take it very seriously, and I am very grateful that I no longer
have to do any of that." It's no performance, but if it were, it would
be classic Nighy, full of well-moderated passion, and moving rather
musically between tension and release.
He gave up smoking, too, just under four years ago, after years of "getting
through as many as I could". However, don't assume that all the
compulsions have gone. There's still Bob Dylan, and Nighy requires a daily
shot. "Yes, it is kind of chronic," he concedes, but without any
signs of wanting to stop. "When I'm working I breakfast with Bob in the
trailer. I try to get him on in make-up but the girls want something more
recent."
This fixation is not new, but goes back to Dylan's first album. Nighy was 14
at the time and living in decent but dull Surrey. The town was Caterham, at
the end of one of the commuter lines coming down into the green belt from
Victoria. He was one of three children. His mother was a nurse and his
father ran a garage. He was a grammar school boy, at John Fisher in Purley;
O levels were looming nastily and he was panicking. His world might be
described as Betjemanic. Then out from the record player came the strange
but intensely moving noise of a young man from rural Minnesota. Some of what
he was singing were folk songs whose origins could be traced back to these
islands. In fact there were only two songs on the album that the singer had
written himself.
