Bill Nighy: ‘Not watching my performances is the only way to do it’

For professional reasons, I have seen Bill Nighy’s latest film. For professional reasons, Nighy himself has not. Everyone seems to find Nighy immensely watchable — except the man himself. As a young actor, he told friends to watch him on TV, not realising how much he would dislike the sight. After the broadcast, he “walked around town all night thinking I have to do something else for a living, because it was so humiliating”.

So, not watching his performances is “the only way to do it”. Nighy has to enjoy them through other people’s reactions. “If I see it, all of that is stolen from me. It could be because I have an all-round dysmorphia or because I have better taste than everybody else.” Where they presumably see a suave professional, he would see “the little bits of compromise, the little bits of cowardice”. He made an exception for Pirates of the Caribbean, in which his face was replaced by computer-generated tentacles. Otherwise “I can’t risk it, because I have to go to work again.”

Nighy’s insecurity has inspired ingenious workarounds. One director, Autumn de Wilde, mused about making a special cut of Emma with none of Nighy’s scenes. Thea Sharrock, maker of his latest film, The Beautiful Game, allowed him to record his additional dialogue without the visuals on. At premieres, Nighy walks up the red carpet — then heads out for dinner (popping back if needed for a curtain call). In person, too, the insecurity can need managing: the last time he did an interview with the FT, in 2011, he was so unhappy with his performance that he insisted on doing another interview the next day. The smoothness was just a facade.

Yet something has changed. Nighy is now 74. It’s two decades since his Bafta-winning breakthrough part in Love Actually, as the old rock star willing to insult his own Christmas record. Last year, he received his first Oscar nomination for Living, bringing to life Kazuo Ishiguro’s script about a civil servant with terminal cancer.

“I had a tendency — it’s still there, but it’s not as virulent — to dismiss anything I’d done, and to catastrophise about it afterwards quite violently. I would just write things off. That was half my life. I don’t do it any more.”

At the Oscars, he bemused photographers by brandishing his granddaughter’s Sylvanian Families rabbit, which had found its way into his luggage. Overall he felt “pretty relaxed. I’m quite old, and I think you run out of the energy to undermine yourself so vigorously. It’s just like, ‘Fuck off, leave me alone, whoever you are, because I’m a perfectly reasonable person and here I am anyway — here we all are, so why not me?’”

Nighy does seem perfectly reasonable — neat, polite, engaged. He gives away enough to seem interesting, not enough to seem off-balance.

The Beautiful Game centres on the Homeless World Cup. He plays the England team’s wizened coach, managing a bunch of misfits and one failed starlet. Thin as a goalpost, he looks like the least athletic football manager in history. But he loves the game, far beyond his local childhood team, Crystal Palace.

According to three or four cab drivers, I already had an Oscar. I’d get in a cab and they’d say, ‘I was dead chuffed about the Oscar, Bill’

“I’m greedy. I don’t want my tribal allegiance to limit my pleasure . . . When I hear the music for the Champions League, my system slows down.” He prefers to watch football at home, alone and calmly. “I like to be near the kettle.” He recently made the mistake of inviting a friend over to watch a match. “He started screaming and shouting and pointing at the screen. I was like: ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not how we roll.’ I think I did have to say at some point: ‘Sit down.’”

The Beautiful Game is a World Cup drama with an activist twist. Some actors had played in the real Homeless World Cup. Previously Nighy fronted a campaign for a tax on financial transactions. He is also an ambassador for the charity Oxfam, recently backing calls for more aid and climate spending.

I wonder whether his social conscience comes from an unease with his belated success. He grew up the son of a Surrey garage owner (“When you opened the front door, the petrol pumps were outside”), and went to drama school in Guildford. He was 53 before Love Actually made him famous. “I don’t know if I have any more of a social conscience than you do,” he shrugs. But as an actor, people ask him to highlight things — and “there’s only one answer to that question, which is yes. You try to do films that, however indirectly, however much of a stretch, help.”

The most moving part of The Beautiful Game involves a recovering heroin addict, Nathan (Callum Scott Howells), who doesn’t stick to his methadone prescription and becomes overwhelmed. Nighy had problems with alcohol. Then, on May 17 1992, he gave it up. Did the film chime with his experience of addiction? “I’d rather not discuss that, Henry, just because . . . it doesn’t work.”

Given his silence on this point, and his general lightness on the screen, it is hard to know how deeply he feels his characters. Could he imagine spending six years learning to conduct, as Bradley Cooper did for Maestro? “If I had to learn some specific thing for a job, yeah, I would learn it,” he says, leaving me not entirely convinced.

Nighy has more films coming up this year: The First Omen, a prequel to horror classic The Omen, released next month, and the Jack Thorne-scripted IVF drama Joy. He’ll also play a psychologist in the thriller series Lazarus, and appear in Sarah Polley’s adaptation of the novel & Sons. “I’ve heard about retirement and I don’t like the sound of it. I like to go to work.”

I ask if the Oscar nomination has changed his life. “No, I don’t think so . . . According to three or four cab drivers, I already had an Oscar. I’d get in a cab and they’d say, ‘I was dead chuffed about the Oscar, Bill.’” Similarly, three people have recently called him ‘Sir’. “On the third one, I did say to the woman, ‘Did you call me sir because of my age or because you think I’ve got a knighthood?’ And she said, ‘You have got a knighthood. It’s just because you’ve been around so long.’”

Nighy has never owned a computer, other than a smartphone, and doesn’t have a car. He insists on being sent hard copies of scripts, and delights in the physicality of books. “Sorry to all people who make Kindles. But somebody gave me a Kindle once, it just made me so unhappy, the whole idea of it was so meagre and dull.”

Last May, Nighy arrived at the Met Gala with Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, leading the internet to swoon at what was presumed to be the most stylish pensioner romance. Nighy’s publicist quickly clarified that “Bill and Anna have simply been great friends for two decades.” Is he an eligible bachelor? “It’s a little late for eligible . . . Do people still use the word bachelor? I wonder about the entomology [sic].” Wait, is Bill Nighy momentarily flustered? Anyway, he’s single.

I start worrying that, behind his debonair exterior, Nighy lacks vices. “I’m quietly extravagant,” he says. My heartbeat rises. “I buy a lot of socks,” he continues, and I nearly burst out laughing. “I’m the greatest dry-cleaning customer in the world. I eat out every night, because I’m on my own, and why wouldn’t I? I know it’s probably decadent, but I do. I take cabs. I love books.”

But the socks? Nighy recalls his penniless youth. “I used to have to wash my socks every night. There were a few squats I lived in, where you had to take the boards off before you could get in the house, because they kept putting them boards up. I’d have one pair of DMs which would go rotten after a while. They’d start to squeak, so people could hear you coming. Then they’d start to whiff.” He seems cheered by the memory. Of all the self-images that Nighy is comfortable with, I’m surprised he chose that one.

‘The Beautiful Game’ is on Netflix from March 29