On the one hand, Bill Nighy getting the chance to meet Adam Sandler at a campaign event marked a true life highlight. Here stood the star of one of his all-time favorite movies, Punch-Drunk Love, and the chance to tell him just how much it meant to him. On the other hand, the occasion also preceded a roundtable discussion with Sandler and other best-actor Oscar hopefuls this year, including Brendan Fraser and Austin Butler, that Nighy found a little, well, “excruciating.” “It is an odd situation, acting as a competitive sport,” Nighy says in our Little Gold Men interview (listen or read below). “It’s sort of bizarre. But everybody knows the score.”

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As Nighy is learning, you’ve just got to roll with it sometimes. After all, this moment feels gratifying too—even with that occasional discomfort. The character actor, who’s been a part of mega-franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter as well as comedy classics Love Actually and Shaun of the Dead, has enjoyed a brilliant acting career mostly out of the limelight. He’s picked up rave reviews and the odd leading role (usually in TV or onstage), and now this year has initiated a kind of industry reflection on all that—a recognition of just how good Nighy has been for so long.

The reason for all this appreciation—and buzz surrounding a very possible first Oscar nod—is Living, the heartfelt remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, transferred to ’50s London by writer Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus. Nighy portrays Mr. Williams, a soft-spoken Public Works employee whose entire being is shaken when he receives a terminal diagnosis. The small-scale drama approaches a kind of transcendence in this man’s realization of what makes life beautiful and worth living—and Nighy’s precisely controlled, gorgeously realized portrayal edges the story toward the profound.

“Even though it’s a sad story, you feel better, inspired in some way,” Nighy says. “You’ve watched something that taps you into humanity.”

Vanity Fair: Living is already a big hit in the UK. Has it surprised you the lengths that this film has traveled and the amount of people it’s found, given that it started as a small Sundance discovery?

Bill Nighy: I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the depth of the response and the universal welcome that this film’s gotten. I thought we were making a good film. I knew we had a great script from Kazuo Ishiguro, and I knew that Stephen Woolley is one of the great English film producers of all time. But you never know. It’s a film where nobody carries a gun and nobody takes their top off. I did offer to take my top off, but they told me to put it back on. [Laughs] Next time maybe. But yeah, it was number one across the nation. I find it very gratifying and very moving.

The roots of this project are with Ishiguro—and particularly your involvement in it. I believe his plan was to write this remake, though it’s very much its own thing, specifically for you. What is one’s reaction to something like that, especially when it is coming from one of the most decorated writers of our time?

It’s hard to contain the information when you first realize that’s happening. All I did was go to dinner with Stephen Woolley and his wife, Elizabeth Karlsen, also a great producer. The other guests were Mr. and Mrs. Ishiguro. And at the end of dinner he said, we know what your next film should be. I thought he was kind of kidding, you know? Then a couple of weeks later, Stephen rang and said that this was his suggestion. It’s an incredible development as far as I’m concerned. I would never have imagined that something like this could happen, but then there’s a degree of apprehension because you don’t wanna mess it up. This is such an opportunity. It turns out, even I have to admit, I didn’t mess it up.

You did not. It’s one of my favorite performances of yours, and I think a lot of that is rooted in how subtle it is. Starting with the voice and the soft spoken nature of this character, I believe that you didn’t really even know how you would approach it until you started filming, is that right?

That’s sort of right. I’d studied hard and I’d said the lines over and over and over again in order to give the impression that I’d never spoken them before. That’s the gig. That’s my job. But tonally, I really only arrived at that particular tone when I first spoke the very first line of the movie. I did expect the soundman to come over and say, “Bill, please, really, we’re gonna do this for seven weeks?” But he never came near me, so I just kept going. I did feel that he would have a kind of reluctance to make too much noise. He’s someone who’s lost his wife at a very early stage in their marriage, and he’s been institutionalized in grief since then, and his personality and his way of presenting himself has formed around that loss. Most of his energy goes into containing things rather than expressing anything.

Was that a different way of going into a character for you? I associate you often with a certain kind of exuberance, but this is one where he is extremely, at least initially, limited. It’s a very specific way that you have to start.

Yeah, it is. I have played what they call “quiet men” before, but this is different from other things I’ve done. I welcome that. It was quite grueling physically because it does actually, weirdly, require quite a lot of energy to contain everything and be that uptight—it’s not nothing.

Have you had another experience on a film where you came in knowing a part was written for you?

I mean, people will say, Oh, I wrote this for you—and then they send you the script and you’ve got two scenes and seven lines. You think, “Oh, you were thinking of me. Well, you weren’t thinking of me very substantially.” [Laughs] Or there’s the other one where they say they wrote it with you in mind, but you don’t believe them because it’s a way of sweet-talking you into taking the job. But David Hare, the great English writer who I’ve worked with all my life—I’ve made three films with him which are now on Netflix called the Warwick Trilogy, which I knew then were written with me in mind. 

So I have had that experience before, but they don’t write precisely for your speech patterns or anything, you know what I mean? People have the idea that it makes it easier or something. It doesn’t, the job remains the same, but when people start writing things with you in mind—that’s, yeah, you have my attention.

As mentioned, this movie has gone on quite a journey, with this kind of campaign rollout, and you are the face of it. How have you found that experience, especially given, it’s safe to say, that you’re more associated with more supporting roles?

It feels good. I’m thrilled by it. Don’t mistake me for anyone who isn’t absolutely over the moon about that. The fact that I have to front it—yeah, it can be kind of daunting sometimes. You think, Please, can you all look the other way for a while? But it’s what they call a champagne problem. So I’m gonna shut up. I’m gonna shut up and get on with it.

One other element of you taking this movie around during award season is getting to encounter other people who are in the race. It struck me that a number of actors including Brendan Fraser and Colin Farrell, are, like yourself, having this kind of moment where they’ve been in this industry for a long time and are finally receiving awards recognition. 

Yeah, I met Brendan Fraser for the first time, who was gracious and charming, and I met Paul Dano. All at the same time—Austin Butler and Jonathan Majors, and Adam Sandler. We all sat around a roundtable. It was kind of excruciating. [Laughs] Kind of excruciating, yeah, but they’re all very, very cool guys, and everybody knows the situation and no one’s got their tongue hanging out. As you say, we’ve been around, so the celebrations can already begin. 

I have to say, Punch-Drunk Love is one of my favorite films of all time. That performance—I was determined that I wasn’t gonna tell [Sandler] because I thought, Don’t do it, don’t gush all over him, just be cool or something. And then as soon as I met him, I found myself saying, “Punch-Drunk Love is one of my favorite films, Uncut Gems is incredible, and you are marvelous in Hustle.” After I saw Punch-Drunk Love, I wrote his name on the front of my next script, because I didn’t want to forget what he’d achieved in that film…. So yeah, I was very pleased to meet him and he was very solicitous and gracious and lovely, as they all were. But it is an odd situation, acting as a competitive sport. It’s sort of bizarre. But everybody knows the score.

I think it’s nice when you get a group of people who maybe deserve a little bit of a moment.

Yeah, yeah. Why not?

I was going over your credits for this year. You have a leading role in this film, you have a role in a Florence and the Machine music video, you played an alien in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and you voiced The Speaker in the video game Destiny Two: The Witch Game. That is a very singular 2022 resume. 

No, that is, I’d forgotten about a couple of those. It was lovely to be with Florence. God, she’s impressive. She was wonderful to work with—they’re tough, those shoots. But yeah, I like it when it gets varied. I’ve been lucky like that.

In your career, you’ve made quite a few crowdpleasers that people watch over and over again. I know you don’t watch your movies. Does it get weird hearing about these movies over and over again, specific scenes and things like that?

On this one, it’s been a bit strange because people are so taken with this movie that they do get down to details and they say, “You know, the scene where you are sitting on the sofa?” and you’re like, “Well, not really.” I mean, I kind of remember sitting on the sofa, but I don’t remember what happened. But it’s okay because I’m not lying. I used to sort of—did I lie? I probably did lie. I used to pretend, or at least I would allow people to have the impression that I’d seen the film because I didn’t have the courage to say, “You know what, I can’t watch.” Now I’m old enough.

Up until now, the film that most people talk to me about—by a mile, because I don’t own a car and I walk around everywhere and I meet a lot of people—is About Time. That’s real. You never know, but that’s entered the language and it’s not just buried somewhere. People are watching it more than once. 

That’s also a movie that didn’t have the biggest opening necessarily, but it’s had quite a life.

Yeah, no, exactly. That’s not an unfamiliar trajectory for Richard [Curtis]. It takes guts to make those films, about how remarkable we are, how tender and compassionate we can be to one another. How all of us have an emotional connection with one another. 

You can draw a line from that to a movie like Living.

Absolutely. It’s one of those films—you come out of the cinema and you feel, strangely, even though it’s a sad story, you feel better, inspired in some way. You’ve watched something that taps you into humanity.

I would guess that after 20 years of hearing about Love, Actually you probably may as well have seen it in terms of the amount of— 

Well, to be honest, Love Actually, I watched it at the New York premiere because it was 20 years ago and there was a lot of pressure. There’s always a degree of pressure because the director wants you to see it, what they’ve done and all of that. I’m quite good at resisting that, but when I went to New York and—you know, that film changed the way I go to work. It changed everything. I can never be grateful enough to Richard Curtis. I’d never been to a big premiere where I had a reasonable part; I had a great part. I was there with my family and I couldn’t find an attractive reason for hanging out in the lobby. It would’ve just looked really weird. So I did sit down and watch it and, and the thing about that is it got laughs. If I get laughs, I’m sort of okay. That’s indisputable. Job done. Doesn’t matter what I look like, doesn’t matter what I sound like.

It’s the feedback you’d learned from theater, I would think.

Yeah, exactly. Precisely. 

After Love, Actually, you’ve said you could stop auditioning. Is there a role that you’ve played since, though, that you did have to really fight for?

I actually had to fight to play Grandsanta in Arthur Christmas. Sarah [Smith], insisted you can’t just say, “I’ll play Grand Santa,” because it’s too much of a risk to have somebody turn up on the first day and come up with some terrible voice. I had a long audition. It was on a microphone for some hours before she said you got the gig. I was very pleased about that. What else? I don’t fight for roles. I’ve never fought for a role in my life. Not because I am above such things or anything, but it’s just, I don’t how you do it. I’ve never felt confident enough to do that. I know you hear stories about actors finding the producer’s personal phone number, or going around to their house and standing in their garden and saying, give me this. I just wait and see what they say.

This interview has been edited and condensed.