Movies |
Bill Nighy
By
Published: Jan 15, 2023
Category:
Drama
“Living” stars Bill Nighy, who is never not flawless. The reviews are exceptional. Do, please, watch the trailer, and you’ll see the appeal of a film about an inhibited, buttoned-up civil servant that seems to have been created expressly for him, and, in fact, was.
Nighy doesn’t court publicity, but at 73, he’s well aware that this is his most crowd-pleasing role since his appearance as Billy Mack, a joke of an aging rock star in 2003’s “Love Actually.” (Watch his scene-stealer, with its classic lines: “Hiya, kids. Here is an important message from your Uncle Bill. Don’t buy drugs. Become a pop star, and they give you them for free!”)
He’s spent the last few months making himself visible in new ways.
He’s both stiff and playful in a Florence + the Machine video.
The New York Times review glows: “There’s a warmth and twinkle to Williams’s existential plight; as in a David Lean movie, passion mingles elegantly with repression, and Williams emerges as a kind of romantic figure, a man shocked, then delighted, by the thrill of finding himself.”
Anna Wintour hosted a screening of “Living,” and it’s rumored they’re seeing one another, a phrase that means something if you want it to.
And then a Times profile revealed a man in full, or almost. Nighy doesn’t watch his movies. (“Well, would you fancy sitting down and watching yourself for a couple of hours? There’s nothing in it for me. I’m not the audience for my work. If I watch it, the whole thing is stolen from me.”) Or read about himself — he much prefers to spend his days reading real books in London cafes. Actors love working with him, directors praise his ability to own a scene just by raising an eyebrow, he’s more than polite to fans.
I was late to “Love Actually,” so my first encounter with Nighy was “State of Play.” (Not the dreadful American remake with Russell Crowe, but the taut BBC series — as you’ll see if you read my review and watch the trailer. (Again, it’s not streaming, and the price to buy it on Amazon will not encourage you.)
“Their Finest,” about a British woman who writes patriotic short films in World War II, was one of my favorites in 2017. In the preview, you’ll see an acerbic and self-adoring Nighy: “Have you seen our film? I’m awfully good.” Happily, you can stream it on Amazon Prime.
Why does “Living” seem like the emblematic Nighy role? Because it was written for him. From the Times profile:
“Living” was written specifically with Nighy in mind. It’s a remake of Kursawa’s ‘Ikuru,’ about a paper-pushing bureaucrat in postwar Japan roused out of his paralyzing inertia in the final months of his life. The novelist and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, whose family moved to England from Nagasaki when he was a boy, had long loved the film and recognized the parallels between postwar Japan and postwar Britain — each struggling to rebuild after the devastations of the war, each full of people straitjacketed by cultural repression and societal expectations — and the potential for a remake of the film, to be set in 1950s London.
One night in London, Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna MacDougall, were having dinner with the producer Stephen Wooley and Woolley’s wife, Elizabeth Karlsen. Nighy arrived late. But it was then that Ishiguro mentioned the idea of a remake — and said it would be a perfect film for Nighy.
Woolley agreed and cajoled Ishiguro into writing the script, even though the author was in the middle of writing “Klara and the Sun” and said he was bad at screenplays and loath to take on anything else. Ishiguro named the main character Mr. Williams as an homage to Nighy’s first name.
To have a Nobel Prize winner interrupt his work-in-progress to write a movie for you — does it get better than that? Nighy sidesteps the question:
“A lot of the way you think about your age and mortality is either mythical or marketing,” he said. “Somehow you’re persuaded to think that certain things are outside of your age, or that you should be drawn to things because of your age. But I don’t want to fall into any of those traps where I’m supposed to expect this or that. I’m a lucky guy. I just want to keep it lively.”
Words to live by.
