Bill Nighy stars in Living, in the British Film Festival
Not yet an Oscar winner, the British actor is generating awards-season buzz for his performance as a buttoned-up public servant in Living.
Bill Nighy is a true original. Wry. Witty. As adept at comedy as he is at drama. He has left an indelible mark on film as the washed-up singer Billy Mack in the perennial gem Love Actually, and as the villainous Davy Jones in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
He starred in the World War II comedy drama Their Finest, was a standout in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and worked on two Edgar Wright movies, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
He has won British BAFTA awards for Love Actually and TV miniseries State of Play, and earned a Tony nomination for Skylight in 2015. Incredibly, he has never been nominated for an Oscar. That may be about to change.
The energetic 72-year-old has delivered an astounding performance in Living, a British remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru (To Live). Nighy plays Mr Williams, a lonely widower and buttoned-up public servant who has worked joylessly in London’s town planning department for decades. He is nearing retirement and after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis he discovers a lust for life and finds purpose in a minor but meaningful public works project.
Critics have raved since the film’s premiere at Sundance. It was deemed so exceptional that the Venice film festival, which usually insists on world premieres, included the film in its program last month. Directed by South Africa’s Oliver Hermanus, Living attracted Nobel prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro to write the screenplay. He wrote it specifically for Nighy.
Nighy says he had not previously seen Kurosawa’s film but he admires it enormously, including the central performance by Takashi Shimura as the public servant.
“If you went to a modern psychiatrist they would say he’s a repressed mess,” he says of the role. He adds with a chuckle: “But I’m drawn to that, probably as a kind of repressed mess myself.
“But I do think he has a kind of heroism, and if you put that in the context of society, where the kinds of things that he exhibits – the stoicism, the decency, the determination to conduct himself well and without too much noise – are so rarely expressed, in our leadership, for instance, it can be very effective.”
When Kurosawa made Ikiru in the early 1950s he set it in contemporary Japan. Living takes place in the same post-war period. The rigid Mr Williams wears a pinstripe suit and an array of hats. Nighy was a boy in the early ’50s and recalls the “horrible grey scratchy shorts” he wore to the local Catholic school, and the “stupid knitted swimming costumes which by the time you came out of the water were sagging between your knees”.
The youngest of three children, Nighy says he missed out on the food shortages and rationing of the post-war years, although as he gets older he has been ruminating on his parents’ experience.
“It occurred to me I was living with two people who’d been through something absolutely brutal and terrible,” he says. “My father was in the services and my mother worked on the buses during the second world war, during all the bombing, and you never knew when you woke up who was left alive and who was not, and which buildings were going to still be standing.
“That’s people in London. They’d been through something that they were not going to recover from anytime soon. Their code of conduct, their manners, was a way of coping. At the same time that thing that people say – to live every day as if it’s your last day on earth – bleeds into the message of this film. That’s kind of what my parents were doing then.”
Nighy is speaking on a Zoom call from London, and he looks very well. I ask him about how he feels about death, which Mr Williams faces in the film.
“Woody Allen said, ‘I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ And that’s pretty much where I stand. I hope it’s painless and quick.”
In Living, Mr Williams’s quest to do something with the time he has left leads him to flirt with hedonism with a young stranger, played by Tom Burke. But he is most influenced by a young woman in his office, Margaret, played by Aimee Lou Wood from the Netflix series Sex Education.
“I haven’t seen Sex Education,” Nighy says. “I mean, I’m a loser. I don’t get out much. And I don’t watch a lot of TV. I didn’t know anything about Sex Education until I met the irrepressible, the incorrigible, the wonderful, the completely enchanting Aimee Lou Wood, who brought so much joy and sunshine into our lives. I should watch it on her behalf. Everybody tells me it’s terrific.”
Nighy has a daughter, actor Mary Nighy, from his relationship with Diana Quick, and his granddaughters have helped him see life from a different perspective. Although he admits that making Living during the pandemic was hard.
“Even despite the evil virus I’ve been able to spend time with them,” he says. “And I think that’s what children and grandchildren are for. The cliche is they keep you young, and actually they keep you young. I work with young people all the time and, you know, people are people. Some you get on better with than others, but there’s often inspiration.”
So what about the hats he wears in the film? Nighy ventured to Broken Hill in 2019 for Canadian-Australian film Buckley’s Chance, and wore an Akubra. “Yes my federation Akubra. I have a brand-new one they gave me. It’s a beautiful hat. And I kept the trilby hat from Living, but not the bowler hat. I mean, how on earth did that ever catch on?”
Is he coming back to Australia?
“I would love to come back to Australia – and I think I am,” he says cryptically. “It’s possible. I love it there. My nephew is in Sydney with his wife and daughter and I have friends there. So I’m hoping.”
Since the pandemic abated Nighy has been making films back to back because of all the projects that were postponed.
“There’s a kind of frenzy of filmmaking in England right now and lots of productions coming in from overseas. I made two films during the pandemic and they’re really good at it now. They’re very responsible about it.”
He certainly has no plans to retire. “It’s one of the good things about my job, because as long as I can remain vaguely upright, say a line, I might be able to get a gig,” he says.
“(Covid) was something that made you think: ‘Come on, let’s treasure everything that happens from now on, let’s really look at one another, let’s take care of one another. Let’s have some fun … I think it was a big shot in the arm for everybody, and whether we’ll all just resume being as neurotic and as distant from one another, who knows? But I hope not.”
Interestingly, Nighy started out wanting to be a journalist. “I went to my local paper, The Croydon Advertiser, and they refused me because I’d flunked school. So I ran away to Paris to write the great English short story and be like the great writers, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I managed to not write a single word. I can procrastinate at an Olympic level. I’m passionate about putting things off and not doing things I’m really good at.”
He ultimately studied acting and worked in theatre, television and movies, but his profound talent for comedy only revealed itself in 1998’s Still Crazy, when he was in his 40s. It was his first film to achieve recognition in the US.
“I worked out a couple of things about comedy,” he says. “I realised a lot of it is to do with pauses, when you pause and how long you leave. The mystery of timing is endlessly fascinating. I remembered watching comedians on TV when I was young, then in the movies, and I saw people doing very small things that get a big laugh, so I figured that was the way to go.”
With Love Actually he made his mark. How does he look back on that film?
“I look back on it very, very fondly because it changed my life,” he says. “It made a lot of things possible. It made it possible for me to play leading roles in other films and it meant that people in America could almost pronounce my name.
“Last Christmas I did a BBC radio reunion with Richard Curtis, Martine McCutcheon and various other people and it was really sweet. The film just goes on and on. It’s quite extraordinary. Now they have screenings here with a live orchestra up and down the country around Christmas time, so people can go to a football stadium and experience that.”
What would he like to do that he hasn’t already done?
“I’d like to have an action career. I’d like to have a franchise where I play the most unlikely action hero in the history of action movies, which would probably mean that I’d have to have a superpower because otherwise how’s it going to work? Look at me! But I would quite like to take on the world and save the world.”
How does he keep healthy? What’s the secret to his eternal youth?
“My eternal youth? No processed sugar. Minimise the carbs and work out three times a week. And dance to social death disco at least once a day. I’m not even kidding. I’ve danced to stuff that people would never imagine. I stick my arse in the air. People would shun me if they knew the stuff that I’ve done.”
Living screens as part of the Cunard British Film Festival, October 19-November 16. General release from March 2 next year.
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Best of the British film festival
Stephen Frears reunites with his Philomena writers, Jeff Pope and Steve Coogan, for The Lost King.
Screening as part of the British Film Festival, it tells the remarkable true story of Philippa Langley, who discovered the remains of Richard III and who through research was able to re-evaluate the king’s place in history. Sally Hawkins delivers a stunning performance as Langley and will surely be up for an Oscar.
Colin Farrell won the best actor prize in Venice for The Banshees of Inisherin, where he reunites with his In Bruges director Martin McDonagh (who won the screenplay award in Venice) and co-star Brendan Gleeson.
Another awards contender is Lesley Manville for Mrs Harris Goes to Paris. She’s endearing in the role of a cleaning lady who comes into a fortune and fulfils her dream of buying a Christian Dior gown.
British-Australian Frances O’Connor convinces with her directing debut, Emily, based on the life of Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte, portrayed by Emma Mackey.
Irish actor Paul Mescal has a chance to shine in Aftersun, which chronicles a father-daughter relationship; while Shekhar Kapur’s cross-cultural romantic comedy, What’s Love Got to Do with It? starring Lily James, Emma Thompson and Shazad Latif, will surely be a crowd pleaser.
The festival celebrates 60 years of James Bond films, which are screening in 4K.
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