Bill Nighy on dashed dreams, golf emojis and playing a cranky novelist

Bill Nighy sits in a north-west London bookshop, phone in hand, talking about the gap between who he wanted to become and who he became. At 76, he has made peace with it—or at least, he has learned to joke about it in a way that suggests the peace runs deeper than the jokes. His new film, & Sons, puts him in the role of AN Dyer, a reclusive novelist who summons his adult children for a dramatic announcement. The setup is familiar enough—a dying patriarch, family secrets, the weight of unresolved damage—but the film nudges into science fiction territory in ways that would spoil the pleasure of discovery. Dyer himself is a man of few words and fewer apologies, a writer so withdrawn he refuses to take phone calls. "I don't do phonecalls," the character grumbles from his sofa. Nighy, by contrast, is voluble and present, though he has his own strict boundaries about how he will and will not spend his time.

The actor is particular about communication. He texts enthusiastically—he was quick on the old Nokia, he notes with a hint of pride—and he has opinions about emojis that are more nuanced than his initial claim of philosophical opposition might suggest. The flamingo works. The purple dahlia works. The leaping shark, especially when paired with a leaping dolphin, has merit. The golfer mid-swing earns his approval when congratulating someone on an achievement. Smiley faces, though, are out. Zoom calls are also out, definitively. "It got to the point where every time I had a Zoom call, it made me unhappy," he says. "I'm old enough to be able to say, 'Can I retire from Zoom?'" At his age, he has begun to refuse other experiences wholesale. Working lunches are "absolutely out of the question now." He has never been a partygoer, and he used to derive a peculiar satisfaction from throwing away invitations, even prestigious ones, without opening them. There is one thing that will make him turn down an acting job without hesitation: togas.

In & Sons, Nighy's character is an abrasive, emotionally absent father who seems to believe his literary talent excuses his failures as a parent. The actor has no patience for that logic. "It's like when footballers behave badly on the pitch and people say, 'Temperament is part of his genius,'" he says. "Give me a break. That's anathema to me. I don't believe it in the least." Dyer claims his parenting goal was to "do no harm." Nighy himself has a daughter, Mary, who is an actor and director, from a 27-year relationship with Diana Quick that ended in 2008. He has two grandchildren now. Did he start with a parenting philosophy? "Blimey, Ryan. It's a long time ago," he laughs. "But no. Not really. You make it up as you go along. You make mistakes, then correct them, and hopefully you arrive at something that works."

The role of a cranky novelist is not typical casting for Nighy. He is known for gentler figures—the unvarnished ex-rocker Billy Mack in Love Actually, admitting his Christmas single is a "festering turd"; the terminally ill bureaucrat in Living, which brought him his only Oscar nomination; the diffident husband in Lawless Heart; the Scrabble enthusiast in Sometimes Always Never. He has done blockbusters too, including two Pirates of the Caribbean films where he was hidden behind computer-generated tentacles. But it is the endearingly flawed, bracingly honest characters that have made him beloved. "I'm not thought of in those terms," he says of the rage and misanthropy his character embodies in & Sons. "Though of course, half my work is not in living memory. You get to the stage where everyone who watched it is dead."

If he is typecast, it does not trouble him. "Maybe there are people out there who like it when I do the things I always do," he says. "Just like I always want Steve McQueen to do what he does." What has he learned from McQueen? "That I'll never be Steve McQueen. You need a lot of confidence to do what he did. No fireworks, no reaching for prizes. It's a kind of reckless restraint." Prince is another hero entirely. "Everything Prince did was attractive. Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat … well, I'll follow them anywhere."

The poignancy of playing a novelist now lies in what he wanted to be as a young man. At 14, his English teacher at Catholic grammar school, Mr. Weir, told him he might try writing a novel. "It was like a bomb going off in my head," Nighy recalls. At 15, he got a job at The Field, a hunting and fishing magazine, where his main responsibility was changing the roller towel in the ladies' room—a task he performed badly enough to amuse the typing pool. He was later reprimanded by the CEO for jumping up and down and waving at a Rolls-Royce that drove past. Then came Paris. "I am a walking, talking cliche," he says. "I ran away to be a writer. Like a million others, I went straight to Shakespeare & Company and hung about thinking I'd write killer sentences and find a girlfriend. Neither of which happened. I ended up begging on the Trocadéro." Someone suggested drama school. He went. He thought he would get around to writing eventually. "I'm still thinking it. I'm just very good at procrastination."

What emerged instead was a kind of verbal memoir, unspooling 25 minutes at a time in his podcast, Ill-Advised, where he serves as a soothing agony uncle answering listeners' questions about everything from fashion to social faux pas. He never sees the questions before recording. "I ramble on the spot but I find that I've thought about whatever the subject might be," he says. "I've already thought about trousers, for instance, because I'm a bit of a fetishist about lounge suits and shirt collars." The podcast has more than 300,000 monthly listeners and was named 2026 Podcast of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild. Nighy is characteristically apologetic about it, giving the impression that his tremendous career and the esteem of audiences and critics have come about by happy accident—stepping off the lift at the wrong floor. Perhaps he will never be Steve McQueen. But the compliments he pays that actor could plainly be applied to himself: no fireworks, no reaching for prizes, a master of reckless restraint.