Bill Nighy on his new film Living: ‘I’m already in the business of trying to make the most of every day’
By Gemma Dunn, PA
From a young age, Bill Nighy knew the nine-to-five wasn’t for him. He did try his hand at a desk job; first as a writer in Paris, attempting to pen the great English novel, and next on his local newspaper back in London. The multi-award-winning actor, who is 72, commuted to an office for about six months.“And I remember standing crammed into a train, thinking,‘This can’t be my life’,” he recalls . “It was embarrassing because there were all these people, but nobody was saying anything. I found it very awkward and uncomfortable.And I just thought,‘I can’t do this anymore’ and so I ran away from it. “I wasn’t very good at knowing what I wanted to do, but I was pretty good at knowing what I didn’t want to do,” he says.“And what I didn’t want to do was go to the same place every day, for the next 30 years, and know how much I was going to make.
“I wanted to gamble a little bit – and then somebody suggested being an actor…”
Fast forward five decades and Surrey-born Nighy (star of such classics as Love Actually and Shaun Of The Dead, as well as blockbuster series Pirates Of The Caribbean) is regarded one of the industry’s finest talents. Nighy has been reflecting on the humdrum working life he escaped due to his role in Living, a British drama film which sees him play a veteran civil servant reduced by years of oppressive office routine. The reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, the feature is directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Hermanus, from a script by Kazuo Ishiguro (author of the novels The Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go). To set the scene, the year is 1953.A London shattered by the Second World War is still recovering.Williams (Nighy) is an impotent cog within the city’s bureaucracy. Buried under paperwork at the office and lonely at home, his life is empty and meaningless.
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