Bill Nighy, stupidly spicy

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Guess who we interviewed this time? A Brit, over six foot two, blue-eyed, with thinning blond hair combed back, always neatly suited, ridiculously phlegmatic, and a specialist in the bone-dry delivery of perfectly timed and intoned one-liners. Bill Nighy, of course.

Bill Nighy played the laconic lead in State of Play, the corrupt senior diplomat in The Constant Gardener, the drunken rock star in Love Actually, the depraved detective in Prime Suspect, and a squid-crab-pirate (Davy Jones) in Pirates of the Caribbean 2. He was giving interviews to promote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in the Soho Hotel in London. The film is a tragicomedy by Shakespeare in Love director John Madden about seven Brits who find their homeland too expensive, too grey, or too buttoned-up and head for India once they reach pension age. The hotel has known better days, but the protagonists have other concerns, such as finding old flames again, fighting loneliness, getting over racism, or – in the case of Nighy – courting a melancholic Judi Dench.

Why did you decide to do The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel?
Bill Nighy: Two words: Judi Dench. None of the rest mattered to me. It was my fourth time working with Judi Dench and I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t even our first love affair. She once played Arkadina while I played Trigorin in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. There are lots of good actors around. And then there is a much shorter list with names like Judi

Dench. She has unlimited access to emotions. She is inspired, brave, and doesn’t use any tricks or techniques. What’s more, she is also a fantastic person. Only she never stops laughing when I’m acting. Especially when you are onstage that is terrible. Then I really cannot look at her or I will fall out of my role.
I’m glad to see you survived shooting in India.
Nighy: You mean I’m no hero in the heat? When you step off the plane in India it’s like a house falling on your head. I couldn’t believe that such heat was bearable. But to my own surprise I didn’t faint. The shoots actually went very well, thanks to the roughly three hundred-strong Indian crew, who clearly knew what they were doing. The locations were sensational. The hotels were designed in such a way that they were really cool. Sometimes they were former palaces with huge gardens with fountains and pheasants. You literally live like a maharajah in them.
Moreover, I’m a great fan of Indian cuisine. It can never be too spicy for me. In India they are very careful with spices for Westerners. When it comes to hot and spicy, however, I’m not an amateur, but a serious pro. For me, it can be stupidly spicy.
Did you do any tourist stuff?
Nighy: You are working six days a week. That is pretty hard. Some of my colleagues took a plane one free day to go and visit the Taj Mahal. I did feel guilty that I wasn’t on that plane…but not for more than half an hour. I never go anywhere. I don’t need to see anything. I like the interior of the hotel room, my book, my music. India, for me, meant rediscovering John Lee Hooker. Him, some Bill Evans, and, of course, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. I’m bad at taking holidays. I have never yet booked a holiday.
The characters in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are almost all retired. Do you sometimes think about retirement?
Nighy: I don’t have any plan. I improvise. I know the concept of retirement, but it’s not for me. The great thing about acting is that you don’t have to retire. So long as he can stand up and mumble more or less intelligibly, an actor is fit for work. Work is important to me. It is a way of expressing myself. I didn’t dare say that in the past because it was too lah-di-dah. But acting really is a way of expressing myself. That doesn’t mean I have to play characters who are like me. It’s not that direct. It means interpreting a more general version of yourself. I’ve got used to that. I don’t want it to stop.
When did you discover you were good at acting?
Nighy: As a young man I read in a newspaper Laurence Olivier’s answer to the question what the basic requirement was for an actor: “hundred per cent confidence”. That discouraged me. I had zero per cent confidence. The American actor Rod Steiger, on the other hand, said you have to burn with the desire to act. That didn’t encourage me either. I wasn’t burning. Most actors don’t have any work. And that’s not down to their talent. It is not because you’re good that you have lots of work. I reinvent myself every day. I don’t live off experience. I imagine a hostile parallel universe in which I can’t act at all, so I’m on the verge of being fired. I imagine an anti-talent and pretend I’m under siege. That is my variant on a method or working process. Until recently I used to sink into the ground from shame after my first dialogue on my first day at work. I used to run to the toilets to check whether I had changed colour, asking myself how I could be so bad.

So are you not proud of State of Play, The Constant Gardner, and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – not to mention [chuckle] Pirates of the Caribbean?
Nighy: If I have ever been proud of myself, it was when I didn’t flee to the airport after a week of Pirates of the Caribbean. Why? They show you footage of the greatest horror from the ocean, stick you in spotted pyjamas, cover your face with white spots, make you put on a skullcap with a bobble and then...they introduce you to Johnny Depp. Even on a good day you look bad next to him. He makes you ashamed that you sometimes worry about the right choice of shirt. Why bother when he is going to outclass you anyway. Anyway, there you are in that sort of clown outfit on a huge American set for a film that costs vast amounts of money. I didn’t know that geniuses were going to make a creature out of me. I could only think of those pyjamas.
But I do recall you doing other pyjama work.
Nighy: Soon you’ll see me again as a demigod in Wrath of the Titans and as a man-eating giant in Jack the Giant Killer. But there is a noticeable evolution. The suit you have to put on is a little bit less marginal. The spots are black instead of white. You know, once you have got the hang of it, that motion capture stuff is not so bad. Jack the Giant Killer is directed by Bryan Singer, whom I knew from Valkyrie. As with Pirates, I felt a little less ludicrous once I had spotted my colleagues in the same pyjamas. I could have kissed them. I couldn’t believe they had been saddled with exactly the same misery.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ••
UK, 2011, dir.: John Madden, act.: Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, 125 min.