{"id":477642,"date":"2026-05-10T11:27:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/477642\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T11:27:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:27:17","slug":"bill-nighy-im-pretending-to-be-irish-so-god-help-us-all-may-my-mother-forgive-me-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/477642\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Nighy: \u2018I\u2019m pretending to be Irish. So God help us all. May my mother forgive me\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is an art to being Bill Nighy<\/a>. I don\u2019t mean that he drags on some kind of bogus persona, but, if any semi-awake comedian were impersonating him, they would have a fair idea where to begin. A good suit. Solid spectacles. Old-school civility. That has been the package for as long as we have known him.<\/p>\n

As he potters into a five-star hotel in Dublin, I make the mistake of asking what he is up to. Plenty, as ever. He just did a television series with Helena Bonham Carter<\/a> called California Avenue. He is shooting a show in Liverpool called (counterintuitively) A Town in Nova Scotia. He flaps an arm before offering an apology that he really doesn\u2019t need to make.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hesitate to bring this up, but I\u2019m pretending to be Irish. So God help us all,\u201d he says. \u201cMay my mother forgive me.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is only right and proper. Both grandparents were born in the old country. Nighy, long resident in London, recently eliminated any possible objections to claiming the nationality by bagging an Irish passport. He always felt the connection, but, like many among the diaspora in Britain, Brexit<\/a> nudged him into taking the leap.<\/p>\n

Anyway, he has never had a problem with accents. We meet before the release of a winsome new feature called 500 Miles. Morgan Matthews<\/a>\u2019s film sends two English kids, Charlie and Finn, on an odyssey across Britain and Ireland to meet up with their eccentric Irish grandad in a picturesque corner of Co Kerry<\/a>. Every vowel is in the right place.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so relieved to hear you say that,\u201d Nighy says.<\/p>\n

Does having relatives who spoke in that accent help?<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it\u2019s nothing to do with that, really,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s just that I have a not-bad ear for accents. The rest is application. I get people to record it into my phone. I always get four or five voices of whatever the accent might be: Australians or Yorkshire or Welsh or, in this case, Irish. I have hundreds of voicemails on my phone: either me trying to do it or other people doing it for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did he get to enjoy Dingle?<\/p>\n

[\u00a0\u2018I think about death 35 times a day\u2019: Bill Nighy on sex, social media \u2013 and being offered a seat on public transportOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, that was all in Wicklow<\/a>, he says. \u201cI was in Wicklow the whole time. I stayed in Killiney. That was very pleasant. Thank you very much. And I had my dinner every night in Dalkey. It was lovely. Beautiful weather. Fabulous coastline. An idyllic place to shoot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nighy is quite the professional. That is just what you might expect from someone who spent so many years as a striver. He has been on stage and screen for 50 years or so, but it was not until the turn of the century that most casual moviegoers put a name to the oft-glimpsed face. The fading rock star in Love Actually<\/a> helped. His barnacled Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean films helped further. Virtually overnight he became a national treasure whom audiences had unwittingly cherished for years (if that paradox can stand up).<\/p>\n

I wonder if the long period flying just below the radar explains why he still works so hard. Nighy regularly clocks up three or four credits a year. Those actors who remember when they still worried about making the mortgage often keep their shoulder hard to the wheel after proper success strikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is definitely an element of that with actors like me who had a reasonably tricky time early doors,\u201d he says. \u201cWork was intermittent. And you didn\u2019t have any money for quite a long time. Or you had some money but not very much. There is an element of that: if I turn this down they\u2019ll never ask me again. I\u2019m always saying these things defensively, because people say, \u2018You\u2019re a workaholic,\u2019 or something. I do get defensive, which probably means they\u2019re right. Ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

Nighy didn\u2019t come from any sort of snooty background. Dad managed a garage in Caterham, a Surrey town on the edge of London. A few years ago the actor told me that his hard-working mum was \u201cbasically Irish\u201d. That is a fair description of many second-generation immigrants to Britain.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother was born in Glasgow,\u201d he says. \u201cHer parents, like a lot of Irish people, came to Glasgow looking for work \u2013 and not very successfully. They lived in the Gorbals, in the tenements where most of the Irish community was based. They were a large Catholic family. <\/p>\n

\"BillBill Nighy, Roman Griffin Davis and Dexter Sol Ansell in 500 Miles, directed by Morgan Matthews <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then somehow they moved down to a little town in Surrey where there was work, because they put all the asylums there \u2013 and I use the word carefully, because they weren\u2019t what you would now call psychiatric hospitals. They were warehousing people in difficulty of various kinds. And my mother was a state-registered nurse there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Talking to his parents and grandparents, he got some sense of how hard it could then be for the Irish \u201cdown south\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey weren\u2019t always welcome in England during that period,\u201d he says. \u201cYou had the dreadful sign, \u2018No blacks, no dogs, no Irish,\u2019 or whichever order it was in. That was in my lifetime. It was still perfectly acceptable to put that sign outside your boarding house.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nighy\u2019s circuitous route to the acting profession has been much chewed over. The young Bill initially wanted to be a writer, and with that in mind he ran off to Paris and starved in a garret for a while. The \u201cgreat British short story\u201d he intended to create never got on to paper. He eventually trundled home to Caterham and recalibrated his ambitions. The Left Bank\u2019s loss was ultimately the South Bank\u2019s gain.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of my idols were writers or musicians,\u201d Nighy says. \u201cI didn\u2019t really have acting idols at all. I really did it for two reasons. I did it to try and impress a girl, and because I thought it was an alternative to a conventional job. I was on the run from a conventional job. I wasn\u2019t very good at knowing what I wanted to do, but I was really world class at knowing what I didn\u2019t want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had a spell as a journalist at The Field, the posh magazine for hunting-and-shooting types, before unsuccessfully applying to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Bouncing back from that rejection, he enrolled at Guildford School of Dance and Drama, alma mater of Celia Imrie and Brenda Blethyn, before embarking on what sounds like an enviable early career with some of the era\u2019s most exciting companies. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Bill Nighy: \u2018My grandmother kind of raised me. She was a proper Irish woman, a Catholic. I was to be a priest\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

He spent time at the Everyman in Liverpool opposite such greats as Julie Walters and Pete Postlethwaite. He collaborated with David Hare, who was emerging as a playwright of note, at the Van Load travelling-theatre company.<\/p>\n

Nighy explains that, as he got deeper into the business, certain fellow actors did begin to have an influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I was quite far into things that I began to select certain performers, like Michael Gambon<\/a>,\u201d he says. \u201cHe was somebody who was of that generation, just 10 minutes before mine, who didn\u2019t seem to be confined by the conventions that were around in terms of performance in those days. He was unexpected and slightly worrying, and he was touched by genius.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can see how Nighy would have been drawn to that late actor. The younger man is not so eccentric \u2013 Gambon\u2019s interviews were legendarily unreliable \u2013 but both have a way with a yarn you\u2019d expect from a London Irishman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere would be moments when you saw him on stage where he would be sublime. It was beyond being in a play. Everyone else would be in a play, but Michael could reach some other level of performance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nighy has always been hip. Or has he been suave? Or can you be both? At any rate, for all the haggard eccentrics he has played on screen and on stage, the actor himself always arrives as the most urbane human in the room. <\/p>\n

\"BillBill Nighy: ‘I wasn\u2019t very good at knowing what I wanted to do, but I was really world class at knowing what I didn\u2019t want to do.’ Photograph: Ariel Fisher\/The New York Times <\/p>\n

An avid music fan, he selected tunes by Bob Dylan (Just Like Tom Thumb Blues), The Rolling Stones (Gimme Shelter) and Marvin Gaye (My Love Is Waiting) for his turn on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Do the sums and you conclude that, now 76, he is just old enough to have enjoyed the cultural excesses of the 1960s. Don\u2019t tell us the tales were all myths. Please.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the thing was, as somebody said, the Swinging Sixties was 200 people in west London,\u201d Nighy says. \u201cAnd the rest of the country was getting on like it always did, in black and white. I was from out of town. I was a suburban boy. <\/p>\n

\u201cI remember my drama school asked me to go back and talk. Somebody pointed out we were here in 1968. Really? Was it that long ago? The Daily Mirror called 1968 the Summer of Love. I remember thinking, \u2018Well, I missed the summer of love because nobody told me about it.\u2019 I didn\u2019t read the Daily Mirror. Ha ha!\u201d<\/p>\n

He goes on to eulogise uncelebrated Caterham as a decent place to grow up. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was quite a large Irish community and Scots community, because there was a lot of work down in the asylums. And they were good jobs. So I grew up in a little gang. We were that little slacker gang, you know, like suburban slackers?\u201d<\/p>\n

And, yes, there is something about those quiet suburbs that generates creative rebellion. David Bowie<\/a> was from the outer ring. So was Siouxsie Sioux.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always obscurely proud of that, because you had that extraordinary thing: all those white boys with guitars. Jeff Beck was from Wallington, where I took my driver\u2019s test. Mick Jagger is from Dartford. Keith Richards is from Dartford. Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton were from Ripley.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BillBill Nighy: ‘I grew up in a little gang. We were that little slacker gang, you know, like suburban slackers?’ Photograph: Gareth Cattermole\/Getty Images for BFI <\/p>\n

Nighy owns to living an agreeable life through the 1970s and 1980s. He was romantically attached to Diana Quick<\/a>, the charismatic actor, from 1982 until 2008, but they never seem to have considered getting married. \u201cMarriage is sort of back in now, isn\u2019t it?\u201d he told me a decade or so ago. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a lot if it about back then.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the mid-1980s he engaged with the great works as part of the National Theatre Company in central London. I recall seeing him opposite Anthony Hopkins<\/a> in Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear (Hopkins as a youngish Lear) and in Pravda, by Howard Brenton and David Hare (Hopkins as a variation on Rupert Murdoch). Those were bold, heroic productions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember standing behind a set, waiting to go on for the first night of Pravda,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd Anthony said, \u2018How are you feeling?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Well, I\u2019m sh**ting myself.\u2019 He said, \u2018So am I.\u2019 I said, \u2018Doesn\u2019t it get any better?\u2019 He said, \u2018No, it gets f**king worse.\u2019 And he was right, because it does.\u201d<\/p>\n

An interesting comment. Nighy gives a good impression of cruising comfortably through the trials and pressures of the profession. Then again, some of the greatest actors have suffered crippling stage fright: Ian Holm, David Warner, Roy Marsden. It is not normal to bare yourself nightly before a few hundred strangers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m terrified, but it hasn\u2019t scared me off,\u201d Nighy says. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know that I\u2019m going to be doing a play anytime soon. Who knows? If it\u2019s something that I can\u2019t bear to see somebody else do, then maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The contained world of film and television does at least keep an actor away from the crowds. You can see him in Notes on a Scandal, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and the Underworld vampire flicks. He tells me \u2013 not something you\u2019d immediately guess \u2013 that he is most often recognised for his role in Richard Curtis\u2019s supernatural romance About Time<\/a>. Four years ago he received a deserved Oscar nomination for playing the dying protagonist of Oliver Hermanus\u2019s Living<\/a>. He had, by then, put in enough hours to be dubbed \u201coverdue\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very odd experience, because you don\u2019t volunteer to be nominated,\u201d he says in his bemused manner. \u201cYou don\u2019t volunteer to have all of this brought into your life. You\u2019re supposed to uncomplicatedly welcome it. And it\u2019s very good for business, and it was very good for the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am sure an Oscar nomination is good for the Bill Nighy business. Not that he ever seems to be short of work; 500 Miles, a film stuffed with goodwill, brought him back to Ireland. There is a fair bit in the picture about loss. There is a great deal about the immigrant experience. <\/p>\n

\u201cI still grieve for my mum and my dad,\u201d he says. \u201cI would like my father to have shared in my good fortune, because I have been fortunate beyond expectation. He would have been completely astonished. And I would have enjoyed his astonishment, but unfortunately he died before anything astonishing happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

More astonishment to come? I don\u2019t see Nighy as the pipe-and-slippers type.<\/p>\n

\u201cI suppose I am now past retirement age,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019ve heard about retirement, and I don\u2019t like the sound of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

500 Miles is in cinemas from Friday, May 15th<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is an art to being Bill Nighy. I don\u2019t mean that he drags on some kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[209200,18,117,19,17],"class_list":["post-477642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-500-miles","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116550044847434839","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}