Bill Nighy has given up Shakespeare and funny trousers - but it took him years to earn the right, he tells Belinda McKeonin New York
Waiting for Bill Nighy in a cafe on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I find myself sinking into a state of deep dread. There's no easy way to put it - this cafe is a dive. In fact, I realise, this cafe is a pub. A dark, subterranean, regulars-only kind of pub, with four watchful drinkers at the narrow bar, a barman barking bets - on boxers, it seems - into the telephone, and a scattering of solo diners tucking into lunches of fried chicken. What looks like 40 years' worth of graffiti is etched deep into the surface of every rickety table in the joint. I'm meeting Mr Dapper himself, the actor whose name is scarcely mentioned without the words "crisp" and "elegant" in the same sentence, and I've invited him to a place that smells of vinegar and beer. The New York Times took him to the Algonquin. The London Times went one better, and took him from the hotel to the impossibly refined surroundings of the Morgan Library to see an exhibition on his hero, Bob Dylan. There might be a Bob Dylan album on that jukebox in the corner, I reason. But probably under a coating of grime.
"Oh, nonsense, it's fine," says Nighy, when he arrives, in one of the most immaculately cut suits I've ever seen. He orders orange juice.
They don't have orange juice. He raises a baffled eyebrow, and, when the waitress is out of hearing, says that he passed a nice-looking place a couple of blocks away. They probably have orange juice. Would I mind terribly if we went there? What a brilliant jukebox, he comments, as he passes through the door. The "nice-looking place" is a diner, as cheap and cheerful as they come. Nighy orders a huge plate of eggs, sausages and bacon, and a mug of English tea, and sits back in the booth with a contented sigh.
IT'S A BUSY time for 57-year-old Nighy, whose star has risen swiftly since he was cast in two memorable - and very different - roles by Richard Curtis in the space of two years: Billy Mack, the withered rock star who proved the comic highlight of Love Actually (2003), and Lawrence, the lonely civil servant in The Girl in the Cafe (2005). He's currently appearing on Broadway, alongside Julianne Moore and Irish actor Andrew Scott, as a reclusive doctor in David Hare's play, The Vertical Hour, in a role that has won him almost all of the little acclaim grudgingly granted to the production by the city's critics. And acclaim is coming in fast, too, for his affecting turn as the humiliated husband in Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, based on the novel by Zoë Heller, in which Cate Blanchett plays his wife Sheba, a schoolteacher who embarks on a passionate affair with one of her 15-year-old students (superbly played by another young Irish actor, Andrew Simpson) under the controlling gaze of Judi Dench's older, bitter marm.
Nighy may also have spent large parts of last year in the clutches of CGI (computer-generated imagery) - he's been a vampire elder in Len Wiseman's Underworld: Evolution, a squid-faced Davy Jones in the third Pirates of the Caribbean film, and an albino rat (or at least the voice of one) in the animated feature, Flushed Away - but Hare's play and Eyre's film have shown once again that, when grounded in reality (indeed, in harsh reality), this is an actor who can deliver performances of intensity and power. With Nighy's trademark comic tics, of course.
"It was quite a relief just to play somebody in proper trousers," he says, in all seriousness. Not a zombie, or a vampire, or a squid, he means. "Somebody who had a family, and who someone called Dad. For me, it was actually a thrill. For most people, it'd be kind of boring, because that's what they always do. But I never get to . . . I hardly ever have children. I'm always some weirdo. And not necessarily a weirdo from another dimension."
In Notes on a Scandal, Nighy's character is a raucously loving father to his two children, one of whom has Down syndrome; it's one of the qualities that most drew him to the part, he says. What made him shiver, on the other hand, was his first glimpse of the part of the script in which his character, Richard, confronts Blanchett's Sheba with the incredible, unbearable enormity of what she has done through her affair. Both their children are listening upstairs, a press mob is en route to the house and a jail term is beckoning; the previously bumbling Richard becomes a vision of blazing, disbelieving rage.
"There's always one scene where you look down the schedule, and you think, ohhhh God," he says. "Because that's the one where you're really going to have to work. It had to be extreme. Because, you know, Sheba hadn't just had an affair. She had exploded the family. There is no redemption, no coming back. Their children will suffer for this, their grandchildren will suffer for this, the family is devastated, forever."
In the end, the scene was realised relatively quickly, he says; he did a quick run-through of what he thought Eyre wanted in the line of fury, and Eyre "went a bit quiet" and decided to shoot the scene immediately. "I think he thought: 'I don't know how many of those he's got in him'," laughs Nighy.
He loves being directed, he says; he calls it "the new radicalism", to glean so much enjoyment from being told precisely what to do.
"There are so many actors who are the opposite, but I don't rely on any muse to hit me," he says. "I don't know if I have one. I'm not self-aware. I have no real contact in that way with my . . . " He pauses. "My feelings or anything. People talk about finding themselves, but I don't have a clue. So I do like for the director to point me in the right direction."
THIS SEEMS LIKE an oddly uncertain way for an actor as experienced as Nighy to approach his craft. But he is uncertain, he readily admits, and has been since the beginning, when he stumbled into acting in the course of a boyhood spent trying to get away - quite literally - from his working-class upbringing in Surrey. Fancying himself a disciple of Dylan and Hemingway, he ran away from his parents' petrol station home several times, on the first occasion attempting to get to the Persian Gulf - "I think I thought that somewhere the future Mrs Nighy was waiting. And that Persia wouldn't be a bad place to start looking" - and ending up, instead, pleading for food in the British consulate in southern France. He returned home, failed school, and told an employment officer that he wanted to be an author. He fled a job as a messenger boy for Paris, where he begged on the Trocadéro, came home and told his bewildered parents that he intended to go to drama school. His father had hoped to see his son follow in his footsteps as a mechanic. But, as definite as the young Nighy's decision might have seemed, it took a long time before he felt anything close to comfortable - or, for that matter, more than mildly interested - in the job of acting. For many years, he says, it was simply something to do.
"My early work involved me standing on stage and not knowing what to do," he says. "I mean literally. Being frozen to the spot a lot of the time, because I was so self-conscious. And it amazes me; it remains, honestly, a mystery to me why I persevered. Or how I could put myself through so much distress."
He felt, at that time, no thrill in being onstage, no sense of drive, no need to act. He acted often - the jobs came his way, though they were poorly paid, if at all - but he acted, he says, with voices in his head; with every move, he imagined the disappointed or scornful reactions of those around him, and he chided himself, relentlessly, to the point of onstage paralysis.
It was a part in Brian Friel's 1973 play, The Freedom of the City, that changed things for Nighy. Not because of the political impact of the play, which was inspired by the events of Bloody Sunday, but simply because Nighy's part required him to adopt an accent.
"Which helped. Because it technically made it not like me. I'm no good at standing there, taking myself seriously. I can just about do it now. But I generally have trouble persuading myself that it's enough that I turn up. That I don't need to offer some kind of trick or something as well."
The "trick" typically offered by Nighy is his comic timing; droll and self- deprecating and shot through with an always discernible note of insecurity, it shows itself frequently in conversation, and is used to its full potential by Hare's script in The Vertical Hour. His friendship with Hare - this is his seventh time in a Hare play - has also been instrumental in easing Nighy into a less panicky relationship with his identity as an actor.
"I used to hitch-hike, when I started out," he remembers. "And I'd get in the car, and they'd say, 'what do you do?' And I'd never be able to say I act. I couldn't form the sentence. I'd say I was a stage electrician, or that I did the lights.
"I just didn't feel that I had earned it . . . I felt ashamed, as though I was impersonating somebody. But working with David, on Skylight and other plays, I kind of turned pro. He gave me complete respect."
Surprisingly, one of the side-effects of Nighy's turning pro was a decision to no longer do the kind of theatre of which many acting professionals dream. He decided a couple of years ago, he says, not to do any more Shakespeare.
"I retired from Shakespeare," he says, out of the side of his mouth, as though confiding an awkward predicament. "Not that anybody got to hear about it. I was probably in the bath at the time. I just thought, 'why give yourself any grief?'. I don't know how to do Shakespeare. I used to joke that it was because of the trousers. I can't operate in a pair of, you know, funny trousers. I used to joke about it. But actually, it's true. I'm not going out in front of people unless I'm in a decent sort of lounge suit. I mean, it's stupid. But it's a fact."
Notes on a Scandal is on general release