In Page Eight, the sophisticated 2011 spy drama written by David Hare, the MI5 agent Johnny Worricker — played by Bill Nighy — had to contend not only with national security risks but with his overly attached next-door neighbour, Rachel Weisz. ‘David has this expression where he says, “Johnny Worricker” and he always laughs, he can never get through the sentence without laughing . . . He says, “Johnny Worricker is susceptible to women.”’ Nighy can’t get the sentence out either. In the second film in the Johnny Worricker trilogy, Turks & Caicos, Worricker, on the run in the Caribbean has to deal with his ex, played by Helena Bonham Carter, and provide a shoulder to cry on for Winona Ryder. It’s tough work, but somebody’s got to do it. When we meet, shooting Spectator Life’s cover in a suite at the Connaught, Nighy is mainlining caffeine. He’s on Jaipur time because he has been filming the sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. But no matter how jetlagged he gets, after working with everyone from Pinter to Stoppard and Hare, he never stops considering himself lucky. ‘I sometimes think maybe when I was sleeping I did a deal with the devil,’ he jokes.
On screen, of course, he is also a frequent collaborator with Richard Curtis, most famously in Love Actually, the film which in 2003, along with State of Play, made him a household name at 53. His close creative relationship with David Hare goes back to Nighy’s first TV role in 1980, in a Hare ‘Play for Today’ called Dreams of Leaving, and the original National Theatre productions of A Map of the World and Pravda. In June, he will be starring in a revival of Hare’s Skylight, opposite Carey Mulligan. Despite continually being cast as the love interest of beautiful women, and having been the partner in real life of the spectacularly beautiful Diana Quick, Nighy can’t quite see his own appeal. Hare once said that Nighy’s skill as an actor ‘is to know on some level he’s a joke — a joke that he shares with the audience’. Some might take this as a seriously ego-damaging assertion but after a few hours in Nighy’s company, I start to see what Hare means. In person, he’s elegant with the slightly donnish air he has brought to films like Notes on a Scandal (2006), and just as well dressed as I’d been led to expect, but he won’t be photo-
‘Sometimes I think
I must have done a deal with the devil’ Bill Nighy on hard work, luck, success and the fear of failure Interview by Olivia Cole, portrait by Harry Borden
29
Bill Nighy_Spectator Life March 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_
29
17/3/14 18:56:07