Since I last met Bill Nighy he has become a little more Irish. We are happy to have him. Who doesn’t love this adorably stringy performer, with his inimitable lugubrious charm?
You can probably guess what made him take the leap.
“I went to bed perfectly confident that we would never leave Europe,” he says of the Brexit referendum of 2016. “We would never do anything so disastrous as leave Europe. Not enough British people would believe the lazy, clumsy lies they’d been offered to persuade them. Of course, I was dumbfounded the next morning.”
Like other British notables with Irish heritage, such as John le Carré and Mick Hucknall, Nighy made moves to secure an Irish passport.
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“I believe the website for Irish citizenship crashed that morning because of people like me who remembered they were Irish enough,” he says. “Both my grandparents were born in Ireland – and my mother was basically Irish, although she was brought up in Glasgow. They lived in the Gorbals, like a lot of other Irish people. It’s a familiar story.”
It is indeed. You could reasonably describe Nighy as the quintessential English actor. Fond of a well-cut suit, he was befuddled in Love Actually, eerily nautical in Pirates of the Caribbean and, for his Oscar-nominated turn in the recent Living, the personification of middle-class reserve. All things you’d expect from a performer raised in leafy Surrey. But Englishness has long, for too-obvious reasons, been tied up with Irishness (and Scottishness and Welshness and Indianness).
“I was aware of the connections,” he says. “I knew where my grandparents came from. I did know my mother’s mother. My grandmother kind of raised me. She was a proper Irish woman, a Catholic. I was to be a priest. That was the hope. I was the last hope, because I was the youngest. I was a likely candidate until I got to be about 15 or 16. I used to serve Mass three or four times a week.”
Later this month you can see Nighy exercising his extreme Englishness as Dr Patrick Steptoe, pioneer of in-vitro fertilisation, in the charming Netflix release Joy. The punny title pays tribute to Louise Joy Brown, who, in 1978, became the first person to be born following fertilisation outside the womb. The unfortunate phrase “test-tube baby” stuck with contemporaneous tabloids, but millions of unexpected parents have since known the process as IVF.
“Louise came to the set,” Nighy explains. “She’s now an ambassador for IVF. She was charming. And she’s had a great life. Patrick Steptoe, after he delivered Louise Brown, said to her mother, ‘Are you going to do it again now?’ Her mother did. And Louise has a sister who got married at 16 and now has five children. She became the very first IVF grandmother.”
The film centres on the late Jean Purdy, the nurse and embryologist who was the first to see Louise’s cells dividing. Like Rosalind Franklin, a vital contributor to the understanding of DNA, Purdy, played here by Thomasin McKenzie, was somewhat overlooked in the media excitement.
“Purdy, the female scientist, was, of course, airbrushed out of the whole story in the traditional manner of men writing male history,” Nighy says. “But it was amazing that it was done under such circumstances. They had no money, no equipment. Nothing very sophisticated. And they failed for 10 years.
“That’s a long time to fail.”
It was 10 years, I think, before I was in front of a camera. You’d make, probably, £25 a week
Let us go back to the young Nighy as he spurns the priesthood. Endless colourful legends have gathered around his early years. His father ran a garage in Caterham, south of London, near Gatwick Airport, and his mum was a psychiatric nurse. By the time he was 15, Bill had begun to have doubts about the whole God thing and made the first of his irresponsible bursts for freedom.
“I ran away twice,” he says. “My friend and I had looked at the map and we’d seen this place called the Persian Gulf, and it sounded great. So we were on our way. We just wanted to be somewhere else. I was that kid. I used to gaze out the window and I’d just ache to be anywhere other than where I was. It could have been anywhere, really, but we centred on the Persian Gulf. We got as far as Marseilles.”
There is a theory that the suburbs and commuter belts of London (Caterham is now just within the M25) generated the great creative rebels of England’s late 20th century. The likes of David Bowie, in Bromley, or Siouxsie Sioux, in Chislehurst.
The urge to kick back against conformity is seen as a powerful artistic motivation. Still, not many rebels actually fled to the Arabian winds while still in their tender years.
“We got very hungry and we got quite scared,” Nighy remembers. “And we went to the British consulate and said, ‘Can we please go home now?’ And it cost money. It cost £25″ – the equivalent of about €500 now – “to get me home. It took me about three years on the petrol pumps to pay it back. My mother and my father were not pleased.”
I can’t imagine Nighy being an aggressive or obstreperous youth. He always seems so calm and polite. Conversation flows like butter down a crumpet. But it is easy to picture him having the sort of oddball tendencies that could trouble home county parents. He did poorly in his O levels and ended up visiting the Youth Employment Service office with his mother.
“I said, ‘I want to be an author,’ and my mother put her foot on mine under the desk and pressed down really hard, as if to say, ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’ But the bloke was very kind, and he said, ‘Well, I haven’t got any author jobs right now, but let’s look and see if we can find something.’ And he did. He found me a job as a messenger for the Field magazine, which was hunting, shooting and fishing.”
Nighy didn’t mind that. He got to deliver stuff in black taxis around the posher bits of London. He got to meet the debutante of the month. Then he ran away again. Pumped with notions of Hemingway and the Lost Generation, Nighy travelled to Paris and set out to write a great novel or short story.
“I ended up begging on the Trocadéro from American tourists,” he says. I didn’t write a word, but my friend Brendan Thomas Elliot – who I still talk with most days – and I begged on the Trocadéro. “Avez-vous un franc, madame?” Which is about the only French I have.”
Eventually he stumbled his way to Guildford School of Acting and found the job he hadn’t known he wanted. Nighy looks to have had a solid career from this point. After a few early roles he landed a spot in repertory theatre – then still a respectable staple – at the admired Everyman in Liverpool. Colleagues included Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite.
The first time I interviewed Nighy I ran through his credits and realised that, in the mid-1980s, I saw him at the National Theatre in London as Edgar opposite Anthony Hopkins’s King Lear and against the same actor in David Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda. Nighy, by then in what would become a long-term relationship with his fellow actor Diana Quick, was all over stage and TV. He wasn’t exactly famous. But I imagine he made a decent living through the 1970s and 1980s.
“I had a job most of the time,” he says. “It was 10 years, I think, before I was in front of a camera. You’d make, probably, £25 a week or something. I lived in digs. So, yeah, I wasn’t deprived or anything. But I didn’t make any serious money for a long time. Eventually, I made it on to the telly. I suppose that was during the 1980s. But it was hand-to-mouth for a while.”
Film wasn’t much of an option for British actors then. The industry shrank into near nothingness in the 1970s and, following the success of Chariots of Fire and the arrival of Channel Four Films in the early 1980s, took a while to splutter back into action.
“I didn’t ever expect to be in a film much,” Nighy says. “Because people weren’t. There were only three English people who were in films. Ha ha! Maybe Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney. There were a few others I’m sure. But I didn’t give that much of a serious thought. I just improvised. I got up every morning and made it up.”
Back then it was easier to live relatively cheaply in London. It is now much harder for young actors, unless backed up by family money, to get a start in the business. Acting is in danger of becoming less socially diverse than it was 50 years ago.
“Yeah, particularly living in London. As you say, it’s virtually impossible. The rents are so high,” he agrees. “It’s very difficult for anyone without any money to get into drama school. Therefore it’s very difficult for them to become actors. So it has kind of reverted. Because the theatre was a middle-class activity when I started.”
That then changed?
“We had a Labour government. They started to educate the sons and daughters of the working class. It was a period of great change. Mind you, I squandered that, because I couldn’t pay attention that long.”
It came good in the end. It came very good for Nighy at the start of this century. In 2003 he was head vampire in the first of the Underworld films. Later that year Richard Curtis’s Love Actually, in which he played a fading rock star, finally brought Nighy, then in his early 50s, a taste of high-end fame. Most movie fans already sort of knew who he was. He was more than a “that guy” actor. But this was a different level of recognition.
“I think it was scheduled nicely for me,” he says. “I can’t confidently tell you I would have dealt with it very well when I was younger.”
He admits he used to be slightly embarrassed about being an actor.
“I’d say I was an electrician. I was going to do the lights,” he says. “I couldn’t bring myself to say that I was an actor. But in the period you’re talking about I did a vampire werewolf movie called Underworld and I did a film called Love Actually and I did a TV series called State of Play. I knew if I didn’t mess it up this could change the air.”
It did indeed. Suddenly strangers were referring to him by something a little like his name.
“I remember walking into a hotel in Los Angeles then and the doorman saying, ‘Good morning, Mr Nigh-Jee. I really like your stuff.’ And I phoned my agent in England and said, ‘There’s a doorman in America who nearly knows my name and he likes my stuff. This has to be worth money.’ Ha ha!”
He’s an original.
Joy is in selected cinemas from Friday, November 15th, and streams on Netflix from Friday, November 22nd
