At 76, Bill Nighy sits in a London bookshop contemplating the distance between the writer he once dreamed of becoming and the actor the world came to love — a gap he has filled not with regret, but with wit, discipline, and a quietly radical philosophy of refusal. His new film, & Sons, casts him as a reclusive novelist whose literary gifts excuse nothing and illuminate everything, while his podcast, Ill-Advised, suggests that the sentences he once chased through Paris may have found him at last, arriving not on the page but in the air. Some detours, it turns out, are the destination.