“There is a way of looking at my life and my career as just one long exercise in displacement activity,” sighs Bill Nighy. Growing up, he didn’t really want to be an actor. “I wanted to write, my heroes were writers. I procrastinate at an Olympic level, and I’ve managed to get to my ripe old age” – he’s 72 – “without writing a single word. I didn’t have the courage, and I think it’s probably a very good thing that I didn’t, because I don’t feel that I would have been a very good writer.”
He tells me all this in that lugubrious, gently self-mocking tone he has, a voice that could bring dry humour and world-weary charm to reading the phone book. Though Nighy’s latest role isn’t exactly that, it’s close: he reads the footnotes, and nothing but the footnotes, to 40 audiobooks coming out in batches over the next year.
Fortunately, the books in question are Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, which contain some of the funniest footnotes committed to paper. Take the one about a very small country that nonetheless had a standing army. Footnote: “Except when he was lying down.” Discworld’s one-liners are superb: “Give a man a fire and he’s warm for a day, but set fire to him and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”
Casting Nighy was a stroke of genius. When he describes Pratchett’s tone – “Droll in the extreme, sardonic, friendly, [with] a kindly but wary view of the world” – he could be describing his own.
Nighy enjoys recording audiobooks – even if it takes “an enormous amount of preparation, if you don’t prepare it can be disastrous” – but he admits he has never actually listened to one. “I don’t own a car, so I suppose that’s probably why. But I take great pleasure in reading, it’s my reward for everything.” He’s a fan of “English sci-fi”, particularly John Wyndham. “I like the juxtaposition between English village life and things from outer space.”
We’re not speaking under ideal circumstances. A Pratchettian farce seems to be unfolding in the background. He’s phoning from somewhere in London, late and apologetic: there’s been “a slight emergency”. Is he at home? “Erm, ye-es, I’m around, sort of thing.” The first half of our conversation is punctuated by a crying baby – “Sorry, that’s my granddaughter giving her opinion” – while for the second half, Nighy sounds as if he’s in a high wind, halfway up an alp.
