On a recent Friday, the British actor Bill Nighy, answering a FaceTime call in his “kitchen-cum-front-room, at home, in England,” stood up to pause the music he was listening to: a song by the twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri. “I found her in a Shazam, in a shop,” he said. He’d added her to a playlist he’d made, which included Alicia Keys, D’Angelo, and Mary J. Blige. “There aren’t that many people who make your heart go boom,” he said. “Mary J. Blige is one of them.” Nighy, who is seventy, wore eyeglasses, a navy V-neck sweater—“I used to be a bit squeamish about V-neck jumpers, but I’m much more relaxed now; they have to be very small and they have to be neat and they have to be navy blue”—and a white button-down shirt. “I had nothing but blue shirts, so I made a conscious decision to get out of that trap,” he said. “The look is—I suppose we’re going for a well-turned-out librarian. Librarian chic.”
Nighy plays a music-loving Merseyside tailor in the movie “Sometimes Always Never,” just released in the U.S. “I got to work in progressive modernist knitwear that I wouldn’t normally have the courage to wear in real life,” he said. “And when I met Carl Hunter and Roy Boulter”—the director and a producer—“I liked the look of them, not least because they were both wearing very discreet modernist brands.” He also liked the script, by Frank Cottrell Boyce. “It involved a certain sort of ironic delivery, which is something I’m drawn to.” As the film begins, his character, Alan, reunites with his son, Peter (Sam Riley), from whom he became estranged after the disappearance of his other son, Michael, who ran away years before, mid-Scrabble game. They’re looking for answers. As the plot unfolds, grudging British bonding occurs, and Alan seduces a married retiree, Scrabble-hustles an opponent with words like “MUZJIKS,” and teaches his grandson to wear a suit. The film itself has a certain ironic delivery—a stylized, whimsical aesthetic, with a mood of comic melancholy.
In creating dialogue, Nighy said, Boyce would sometimes “YouTube me, find out stuff I’d said in real life, and put it in the script”: a pro-Marmite riff from a red-carpet interview; a definitive pronouncement on suit-jacket buttoning. When buttoning a three-button jacket, Nighy explained, it’s sometimes for the top one, always for the middle, and never for the bottom.“If you meet a man with the bottom button done up, call a cab. He’s not currently functioning—you shouldn’t be breathing the same air.”
“Sometimes Always Never” is set in Liverpool—the site of Nighy’s first professional acting gig. He grew up in Surrey; as a struggling actor, he sold women’s clothing at a stall in an old-time market. (“I was opposite the egg man. It was the summer where all the girls wore cheesecloth, the long wraparound skirts. I put the skirts on in order to advertise, and the egg man treated me with disdain. I used to sell a lot of cheesecloth.”) Then he was hired by the Everyman Theatre Company, in Liverpool, where he acted alongside Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite. “I went to Liverpool in nineteen whatever the fuck”—1974—“and walked into what was, forty years later, described to me by an interviewer as ‘the forefront of British political theatre.’ I said, ‘Really? I thought it was us just bundled into the back of a van, playing prisons and bookstores and pubs.’ ”
At fifty-three, Nighy became a household name for his role in “Love Actually.” He played Billy Mack, a joyfully dissolute pop icon in an open-collared getup. Then he appeared in two “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, as the dastardly Davy Jones, who has a cephalopod for a face. “People say, ‘You’re that bloke—you’re the squid man!’ ” he said. (He once visited his friend Lauren Bacall for breakfast and inadvertently terrified her grandsons. “Their mum went to the bedroom and said, ‘Boys, come out—Davy Jones is in the kitchen!’ So they locked the door. Like, ‘Are you insane?’ ”) Yet widespread recognition has its limits. Last year, after presenting an award at the BAFTAs, Nighy said, “I walked in the darkness of the backstage, and there was Mary J. Blige. I went up to her and said, ‘You’re an inspiration to me. I listen to your music every day. Thank you.’ She just looked at me—no idea.” Why didn’t he mention “Pirates”? He laughed. “ ‘I’m the squid man, come on!’ ” ♦
