Bill Nighy Is Making Up for Lost Time

Oh! That’s huge.

I was quite nervous and I obviously obsessed about the tunes. It drove me insane. It’s like, what about that? What about that? Then you think, oh, I’m only choosing that because that’ll make me look…whatever. You know? And you think, no, choose it ’cause it swings. Choose it because it’s a groove.

It really had a good mix of styles and periods.

I was gonna coin this phrase, but I resisted it ’cause it sounded pompous. But you know, music now exists outside of time, because young kids or older people can listen to anything, all the time. You don’t have to worry about when it was released, because it’s on your phone and it just came up, so you might as well listen to it, you know? So, I was thinking along those terms. And I Shazam a lot in stores or restaurants, and quite a few tunes come out of that. 

Of course, you’ve played rockers in films in the past, but has the opportunity to do an actual musical ever come your way? And if it did, would you want to try that?

When you do a play, it’s so grueling doing eight shows a week, it’s such hard work, but if you want to make yourself feel better, it’s infinitely worse to be doing a musical. But I wouldn’t mind doing a certain kind of musical. I’m not that confident singing, but I can hold a tune, and I love singing. I love people singing. I listen to great singers—Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight—all kinds of apparently effortless geniuses. I’m thrilled by that stuff. I’m more of a bathroom singer, but if they could design a musical that included me, I think I’d be happy.

I’m sure people would love it. Living is, in part, about Mr. Williams finally completing a Public Works project that he’d been putting off. Is there a sort of white whale in your own career? Anything that you’ve always wanted to do but never quite had the chance to, or maybe the timing wasn’t right?

I’ve never had goals. I always knew you were supposed to have goals, but I was always going to decide on that tomorrow, and tomorrow never came. But I’ve never had roles that I burned to play or anything like that. The white whale in my life is writing. My heroes were all writers—writers and musicians. Even now, I watch films and I go to the theater, and I love those things, but the things that are my primary enthusiasms are reading fiction and listening to music. The other white whale would be singing, actually. But I don’t mean that in a public way—I don’t fancy standing in front of an audience. But I wouldn’t mind being in a recording studio. [But with writing], I mean, my whole career could be seen as just one long exercise in displacement activity, because I couldn’t sit in a room with a blank piece of paper.