It’s mid-afternoon in the Soho Hotel, but, for reasons that I never fully establish, the curtains have been drawn against the daylight. Bill Nighy, eternally crisp in a well-fitted suit, opens the door and extends fingers that – thanks to a troublesome condition called Dupuytren’s contracture – can never be entirely straightened.
“Yes, hello. Erm, over here I think.”
If one didn’t already have a handle on Nighy, the experience could be a little unsettling. He could be the butler in a period horror film. Happily, the suave Nighy we know from dozens of British films, soon asserts . . . No, “asserts” is wrong. He smooths his way into the conversation. He sinks nonchalantly into the chat as one might ease oneself into a vintage Jaguar.
He is fiddling with a handheld device that is currently emitting Van Morrison. “Yes. Hmm? I’m not very good with concerts, but I’ve seen Van many times,” he says. “Last time I saw him I just felt glad to be alive in these times.”
Now 65, Nighy has just reunited with the cast of the "grey pound" hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for, yes, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Judi Dench, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith and Celia Imrie have all travelled to India for further golden-years misunderstandings.
“Old friends? I have been married to Penelope Wilton at least twice before. I have had letter sex with her on the radio. I’ve been Judi’s love interest four or five times. So, yes.”
Grey pound
It is fiercely patronising to use the words “grey pound”, but it looks as if the industry has finally come to recognise the appeal of older actors. A few mainstream films are now aimed at people who can remember decimalisation.
“The reason I went for the first one was not just because it was in India,” he says (more defensively than is strictly necessary). “It was a good script. But you get these marketing ideas. They deal in subsets. Everything must be aimed at audiences between 17 and 34. But they seem to be realising that older people can get out of their armchairs and make it into the cinema.”
Nighy is in an interesting place to consider the older performer's place in the entertainment machine. Raised by working-class parents in Surrey, he has been a full-time actor for four decades, but it wasn't until middle-age that he became properly familiar. Following study at the Guilford School of Acting, he worked at the National Theatre and the Everyman in Liverpool. He did the odd bit of telly. His role in the TV series The Men's Room, in 1991, drew some attention. Nighy would argue it took another decade – until Love, Actually – before anybody much recognised him outside the UK.
"Well, I had been only vaguely well-known until then. If you saw me in the street, you might think I was your dentist," he says. "When Love Actually came out I did push it to another level. Look, there are no downsides to this. When it first started it just meant more money and that was welcome for someone who hadn't had enough money for long periods."
He smiles and relaxes into a happy memory. “I’ll tell you. The first time I went through a hotel door in LA and the doorman said, ‘Hey, Mr Ni-jee. I love your work,’ I immediately phoned my agent: that’s a couple of extra bucks. There is no downside. It means I can choose my work.”
Since then he's popped up in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the movie Underworld and (inevitably) a Harry Potter film. Good at posh patrician confusion – although his dad managed a garage – Nighy has mapped out a little corner of Hollywood for himself. His pleasure at securing a modicum of comfort can be excused.
How hard was it in the early years? Were there Withnail & I moments?
Untaxable
“There was some of that,” he says. “Let me put it this way: I was untaxable for about the first 10 years of my career. I didn’t make £500 a year and couldn’t be taxed. When you get a family it’s different. It’s fine being skint when you’re on your own. If you have trouble with the rent, you move. That’s what everybody else was doing.”
He mentions family. Nighy was in an 18-year relationship with the actress Diana Quick – best known as Julia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited – and the couple had a daughter in 1984. Quick and Nighy never made it to the altar. No woman has got him to sign the register since. Is it worth asking why?
“No, I’ve never been married,” he says with a drawl. “There was nowhere for me to go. Marriage is sort of back in now, isn’t it? There wasn’t a lot if it about back then. Where are you going to go? I have no God. A registry office didn’t sound like much. I don’t think the tax situation was very beneficial. I don’t think anybody would have married me anyway. But it just wasn’t a thing you did.”
It’s funny. Is it not? Had anyone told us, 30 years ago, that gay people might be free to marry in 2015 we would have been delighted, but we might also have wondered whether anyone would still bother with the institution.
“Yeah. It’s back with a vengeance.”
Still hip
He has a nice way with a neat phrase. It comes as no enormous surprise to learn Nighy wanted to be a writer when he was a young man. Still hip after all these years, he has the swagger of the beatniks and lost-generation exiles that he sought to emulate while growing up in sleepy Caterham.
What strange tangles life has for us. Before acting caught up with him, Nighy made an attempt to launch himself as the next William S Burroughs. What pulled him away from writing?
“Like everybody else: not doing any writing,” he says. “That was my literary career. I really did sit in a room in Paris with a blank piece of paper and a pen. The doorbell went and that was the end of my career. I didn’t have the courage of my heroes.”
Nighy’s dad seems to have had a fair grasp of the direction his son needed to take. Forty years later, lurking in the sepulchral Soho Hotel, Nighy remembers talking to David Frost on that late broadcaster’s Al Jazeera show. When things had been looking bleak in the early part of his career, Nighy was tempted to get a VW bus and, as was then the way, make for the oblivion of the open road.
Frost knew the story: “He asked what my dad’s name was and turned to the camera and said, ‘Alfred Nighy, thank you.’ I phoned my sister and my brother said: ‘You won’t believe this. David Frost just said dad’s name.’ ”
The cool hasn’t quite broken down. But he seems quaintly excited. I like your work, Mr Ni-jee.
