‘Oh, my God, my mother, she's Scottish’. Quintessential Englishman Bill Nighy on his mother's Scottish roots.
The award-winning actor turned 'agony uncle' is astonished his 'ill-advised' podcast is a hit as he answers listeners’ social and sartorial dilemmas.
Bill Nighy is feeling awkward. He isn’t sure he’s agony uncle material yet his advice is so eagerly sought that his podcast, ill-advised by Bill Nighy, has been voted No 1, and he is embarrassed by the praise.
Billed as a podcast for ‘people who don’t get out much and can’t handle it when they do, a refuge for the clumsy, and the awkward’ it sees the acclaimed actor answering questions and dilemmas posed through Instagram voice notes by listeners seeking his wisdom on everything from relationships to social and sartorial etiquette.
For example, Me: Should people snip the thread on the vent of their new coat or jacket?
Nighy: “Oh this is people that don't know about clothes who don't know that you're supposed to snip it. It's a terrible decision not to do that. That's a very good question. It is something we've discussed.”
Much as he’s enjoying the podcast, he insists he isn’t qualified, his strategy being to do the least possible harm with his suggestions before apologetically swerving off into one of his life-time’s worth of entertaining anecdotes.
Now in its second season after weeks at the top spot in the charts, the podcast produced by Alice Williams and Ciara Gregory, lands on Thursdays in ten weekly parts. Along with questions, there’s an "I'm With The Band" feature where listeners submit names and lyrics of their teenage bands, playlists of the week, book recommendations and listeners’ pet peeve words for banning.
“Nostril,” he says, joining me on a video call from his London base. “Someone wanted to ban ‘nostril’. You can’t. I think that’s the only one we’ve refused. I mean, I don't ban the words, I refer them to the Permissions Committee for ratification. I’m just a mouthpiece.”
Banning things is not 76-year-old Nighy’s style. He’s more a ‘I’d rather you didn’t and I wouldn’t do that myself’ kind of guy, politely making suggestions, invariably segueing into stories illustrating his own failings and adventures.
In real life he’s more like his character Douglas in The Marigold Hotel films - dapper, courteous, self-effacing, almost shy - than the terrifying, broken-heartearted sea monster Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean or the guitar-playing washed up rock god Billy Mac who inspires undying devotion in his sidekick played by Gregor Fisher. He’s taken aback by the success of his latest enterprise, which took top spot at the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards last month.
“This all came as a total surprise but it’s been received extremely well. It's been fun. And they weed out anything that might require real wisdom. I answer questions about trousers and socks. That's more my level. If you ever catch me pontificating about something like relationships, call a cab because I'm not your man. We keep it as inconsequential as possible.”
“I’m really pleased. But I never listen to it (he doesn’t watch himself on screen either, finding it too painful), so I can only assume my producer performs some miracle. And, I’m not being coy or modest, I’m genuinely, sincerely, surprised anyone finds it interesting because it's just me blathering on. People who know me say, ‘well it’s you sitting in your kitchen’ and I’m like, ‘that's all I’ve got to offer’.
“I've tried to unplug from having any responsibility to be entertaining, or wise, because it's hung on the fact that I'm supposed to be usefully answering questions about people's lives.
“The danger of getting to my age is people mistake you for somebody who knows what to do, or what's going on. In other words, wisdom. The joke is I know the answer to their questions about as well as they do. I try to answer but mostly it bleeds into stories about something that's happened to me. I shamelessly throw them in because it's probably more interesting.”
Nighy might think he doesn’t advise on relationships but I’ve heard him telling a man about to get married but fearful his pale complexion might prompt a rethink in his betrothed on their sun-seeking honeymoon. He reminds the listener he’s been chosen him for himself, not how his skin responds to sunlight, before recounting a tale about his own proclivity to burn and how in his younger days, holiday companions rolled his sun-blistered body around in his sleeping bag to hear his screams.
“No, that is quite good advice,” he admits. “It sounds like somebody else. Honestly, I really don't remember anything I've said. People come up in the street and say I agree with you. I'm like, ‘really? Did I say that?’
With the podcast billed as the ‘refuge for the clumsy and awkward’, does Nighy still feel clumsy and awkward?
“No, I'm all right mostly now. There are occasions where I get a wave, an accident happens and suddenly you feel like you haven't got any skin. But experience has taught me I'm sort of OK.
“It was a cult of inadequacy, and there was only one member: me. The thing about the tendency to self-denigrate is the writing in your head is so bad. And in the end you go, ‘hang on, it can't all be bad, otherwise people would run away from me in the street’. Maybe you just need your energy for other things. That’s pretty much the process, but it's taken a long time.”
With his customary polished manners Nighy had opened our conversation by enquiring after my health and whereabouts and learning I’m in Edinburgh declared his love for the city.
“Lovely. I had my holiday there a couple of years ago. I can't take great heat so I thought, I'll go to Edinburgh. I like it. The first time I ever got employed just to act and not paint the set or drive the van was in Edinburgh. At The Traverse theatre, the old one which was tiny, but very glamorous because you had to go up a winding staircase. And I had to sleep on the stage at night. I went back to see the theatre when I was on holiday. The old man going back, it's a strange feeling.”
Nighy - it ‘rhymes with thigh’ he tells me - has had a long stage and screen career since The Traverse in 1971, winning two BAFTAs and a Golden Globe, in addition to nominations for a Best Actor Oscar, a Tony Award, a Laurence Olivier Award and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. After success in theatre in the UK and US, he was catapulted into the limelight in 2003 by Love Actually, which brought him the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA, and numerous films including the Pirate of the Caribbean film series, Shaun of the Deat, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1, The Best Exotic marigold Hotel films, About Time, Emma and Living (which saw him Oscar nominated) have seen him arrive at national treasure status.
His time in Edinburgh is not this quintessential Englishman’s only connection with Scotland, as his mother hailed from north of the Border.
“My mum was born in Glasgow along with five brothers and four sisters and grew up there before the family moved to Surrey,” he says. “About five years ago I did an Agatha Christie [Ordeal By Innocence, with Morven Christie] and stayed in Glasgow for six weeks, the first time I'd had substantial time there.
“I thought about it being my mum's city and it brought home what it must have been like for a 15-year-old girl to leave and go to Caterham, a small, semi-rural town on the edge of the North Downs in England. It must have been a huge shock for them. My grandmother, who was a seamstress, brought the girls down, and they all sewed and made dresses and got the rail fare for the boys and the old man, my grandfather, who came down and got a job in my hometown.”
Nighy’s father Alfred, worked in the family chimney sweeping business before managing a garage, and his mother Catherine became a psychiatric nurse in the hospital where young Bill also worked after leaving school at 15 without any qualifications.
Did he channel her accent playing Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean’s, Dead Man's Chest and At World's End?
“It wasn't her accent, no. It’s funny, I never used to think my mother was Scottish when I was a kid until we got a phone. She would never use it really, but occasionally, you'd be on the phone to her and think, ‘Oh, my God, my mother, she's Scottish’.”
Given that he has so many entertaining anecdotes, why doesn’t he write an autobiography?
He laughs. “Why don't I? All the talking I've done and the times I've answered that question, I could have written it five times by now. It’s because it's close to my heart and I'm scared of it not being any good. I wanted to be a writer when I was young and I never put pen to paper because I was always too fearful. Then I became an actor as a kind of displacement.
“My career has been a whole campaign of displacement activity involved in me not being a writer. I wanted to be a journalist and then I was going to write the great English novel like every second person. But, actually, I ended up…” He trails off modestly.
An award winning actor.
He continues the tale of how he was offered a job in journalism.
“I was the boy - at 16 - who got the coffee and changed the roller towel in the ladies' room. There was a typing pool of young women and I was completely paralysed in the company of anybody female. They spotted I was easy to wind up so whenever I went to change the roller towel they would come in - and there was a bed where you lay down if you were overcome - and, um, they used to lie on it, not because of my animal magnetism but because they enjoyed winding the kid up. They were in their 20s, exotic. It was a nightmare. And you know when people are watching, I would make a mess of the roller towel.
“Anyway, they offered to put me in the subeditor's office so it was working out. But then I ran away to Paris. To write the novel.”
The novel never did get written as Nighy enrolled at Guildford School of Dance and Drama and hit the stage.
However, the actor’s love of words persists. An avid reader, his conversation also betrays a desire to find the correct word or phrase, refining and revising what he has said, searching for pearls as he goes. It would be a pity if the autobiography were never written.
“Well, I had lunch with somebody this week actually, and made a promise. I said ‘I'll write something, I'll write a bit and show it to you.’ Because it's somebody I like and would respect their opinion.”
“And also for my daughter and two granddaughters, more than anybody else.”
His daughter is actor and director Mary Nighy (Alice, Darling) with former long-term partner fellow actor Diana Quick. Nighy is currently unattached. Does he like it that way?
“Well, it's just the way things are, you know? It's just what happens. I'm perfectly comfortable, but yeah.”
Returning to the subject of the autobiography he says:
“The thing is if I don't write it someone else might. There was a clumsy rush job which luckily didn't catch on. And if there's gonna be a book about me, it should come from me. Therefore I have a responsibility to do it, so even as I'm talking to you, I'm working this out. It's happening.”
As his podcast agony uncle role takes off, Nighy’s acting career also continues to flourish.
He’s just finished filming British director Babak Jalali’s next feature, A Town In Nova Scotia, as well as Morgan Matthew’s 500 Miles with Maisie Williams and is voicing a character in upcoming animated fantasy film The Turning Door, alongside Alicia Vikander, Jamie Dornan, Gillian Anderson and Jodie Turner-Smith.
In A Town In Nova Scotia Nighy leads the cast as Leon, a widower living in a Liverpool block of council flats, along with Makram J Khoury as his best friend Saleh. News of a deadly tower fire sees Leon struggle with his daughter’s offer to join her in Canada.
“Babak Jalali told me it was triggered by Grenfell,” says Nighy, “and the stories coming out about it. How at a time when people of bad character were trying to estrange us from one another by emphasising the differences between us, you have stories where a white man would carry a black woman several floors down to save her life. In extremis we become human beings. It's been said that prejudice doesn't survive proximity. Which is not always true, obviously, but anyway it's not about Grenfell or those stories, it's about a lifelong, non-romantic friendship between an Irish man and a Syrian man.
“My character doesn’t want to leave his wife alone in the cemetery and Grenfell happens and he becomes obsessed with it and starts to agitate in terms of the building. It's as dry as you can be, as droll as you can muster, which is fun. I coined the phrase ‘dead pan productions’. It's like when you do a mockumentary and have to forget anything to do with acting, leave behind any bits of spin you think makes you a bit more interesting and it's quite difficult to do. Then you have to deliver quite big, soppy jokes without laughing, which becomes irresistible. It’s good fun.”
Aside from acting work, Nighy has also been recruited for his customary sartorial style and has collaborated with high-end British heritage knitwear brand John Smedley, designing a collection of men and womenswear.
Customarily dressed in a suit or jacket, shirts and ties, shoes polished, his dapper dressing began through keeping suits from acting jobs as he didn’t have many other clothes. As a Mod in his youth, he always had an eye for fashion.
“I genuinely have real enthusiasm for clothes,” he says. “I register the difference between that which looks aesthetically pleasing and that which doesn't. But also that was a kind of disguise as well. It was ‘I may be inadequate and ridiculous, but check out my strides’.
“So just before last Christmas John Smedley phoned and asked would I collaborate on a collection. If you'd told me this at 16 when I used to save up for John Smedley leisureware! Well, I must have been good in a previous life.
“But I'm actually very proud of what we did, me and the young women who helped me.”
Nighy has introduced two innovations with his collection; unisex designs and what could be a response to a podcast question - ‘what is the correct length for a man’s cardigan?’
“I said I want to take four inches off the men's cardigan because they’re all too long and you have to rumple them up onto your waistband. It looks terrible. They didn't flinch. We actually took about three inches off so they arrive on your hips where they're supposed to stop.”
Which brings us to what is he wearing today?
“A pair of Church’s black Oxford shoes, a grey suit by P Johnson and a very beautiful cream shirt by NN.O7. Also a very beautiful dark blue wool winter coat by Thom Sweeney. It's a really good coat, and it's been a real success.”
A bit like his podcast, no matter how much he demurs about not being any good at it.
“It's just a cup of tea with me. And it's very satisfying that so many people apparently want to have a cup of tea with me. One cup is one thing, but they come back and have several, which even I have to accept means they're not all mad.”
Season 2 of ill-advised by Bill Nighy drops every Thursday wherever you get your podcasts with subscriber options coming soon on Patreon.
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