Bill Nighy on the Oscar Buzz Surrounding ‘Living’: ‘I Don’t Get Out Much’

Brent Lang
·4 min read
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For Bill Nighy, the road to a character’s heart runs through his tailor. “The clothes govern how you move, how you think and how you feel,” he says.

In the case of “Living,” the story of Mr. Williams, a bureaucrat in 1953 London grappling with a fatal illness, the meant donning a bespoke pin-striped suit. But he struggled with the wide shoulders that were the fashion of that era. “I didn’t think I had the frame to pull it off,” Nighy says. And there was one feature that was particularly burdensome.

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“I had to wear a bowler hat, and they are absolutely bizarre,” muses Nighy. “How they caught on, I’ll never know. If a brick fell on your head from a very great height, you’d be fine. If you fell off a horse or a motorbike, you’d emerge unscathed. You could go to war with that hat on and be well protected.”

At one point in the film, Mr. Williams is separated from his trusty bowler, and Nighy was incredibly relieved. But all the sartorial suffering he had to do for his art appears to have paid off. Nighy has received some of the best reviews of his career for “Living,” which debuted at Sundance and sold to Sony Pictures Classics. The indie studio is mounting an Oscar campaign for “Living,” one that has taken the movie and its star to the Venice and Toronto film festivals before it opens in theaters in December. So is the Academy Award buzz getting to Nighy’s head?

“I don’t get out much, so I really haven’t heard anything about it,” Nighy says. “I’m not being cute, I assure you. If the film were honored in that way, it would be absolutely marvelous. I want people to watch it. If the Academy were to decide to nominate us in any way, it would be an enormous thing for us.”

Nighy first found out about the project at a dinner with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who told him about his long-gestating idea to transfer Akira Kurosawa’s classic film “Ikiru” to post-war Britain with the actor in the leading role. There was something about Mr. Williams’ stiff upper lip character that seemed like a perfect fit for Nighy, who has made a career of bringing the many facets of the Union Jack to life on screen, from louche rock gods (“Love Actually”) to repressed upper-crusters and functionaries (“Emma,” “Page 8”). Mr. Williams certainly falls on the latter end of that spectrum.

“I’m interested in what’s usually referred to or what they call ‘Englishness,'” says Nighy. “I don’t think those characteristics are actually exclusive to England, but there is something about their chosen manners, their chosen style, the way they respond emotionally to things in Britain in the past century that is appealing. I am very interested in the degree of restraint that they showed. It’s often disparaged as a kind of denial of emotion that is inauthentic. I disagree with that.”

In “Living,” Mr. Williams has spent a lifetime in government as a civil servant with little to show for it. His job in the Public Works office seems to be designed to slow down the construction of parks and other civic endeavors rather than expedite them. His days are a whirl of papers and forms, signifying nothing. At least, that is, until he receives his diagnosis. But Nighy understands the bureaucratic malaise that threatened to consume Mr. Williams.

“I personally procrastinate at an Olympic level,” says Nighy. “In this film, that drive to procrastinate is represented by an institution inhabited by loads and loads of people who engage in a whole enterprise that is designed to prevent stuff from happening. Procrastination is the great corrosive element in all of our lives.”

That seems like an odd admission given that Nighy has averaged two to three movies a year for the last few decades, with several television appearances and stage shows thrown in between them. If that’s the case, what has this drive to procrastinate prevented Nighy from accomplishing?

“I’ve put off writing the great short story,” says Nighy. “I’ve been meaning to write that one for nearly 55 years. But every morning I get up ready to work and I’ve still never written a single word of it.”

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