Finding Success as an Actor: Being able to completely escape into a character, like Nighy does with Davy Jones, is one of the reasons people become actors. Nighy joked that escaping was part of why he took up the profession.
“I really wanted to escape from getting up every morning and going to work," laughed Nighy. "That was my big thing when I wanted to be an actor. I am not just being glib. I had no idea of what being an actor meant when I became one. I became one because I met a girl and she said, ‘You should be one. I didn’t get the girl, she got married? Anyway, she could have said ‘astronaut’ and I would have gone that way. I wasn’t driven to do it. I literally, honestly, it is absolutely true, I had no plans in that area. It was just that she was the first girl that ever kind of looked at me.”
With that sort of start, Nighy didn’t expect to find the success he has had as an actor. “I guess everybody must feel this… I am completely astounded by it. Every little bit that has happened to me; every sort of stage of the game I have never quite believed it.
I know this is not uncommon, and I am sure in your game or anybody’s game, at some point, maybe, if you are like me, you think that somebody is going to tap you on the shoulder and say, ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ or whatever. To any degree of success, I find it completely astounding, actually. Not because I don’t think that I have delivered, on occasion, but my expectations were very low. There were no precedents around our way, for actors. I didn’t know any actors. I didn’t know that you could make a living and my father didn’t know that you could make a living. When I said to my father, ‘I am going to be an actor,’ he didn’t know. He was very cool. He didn’t say, ‘Are you insane?’ He didn’t do that. He said, ‘Well, what do you have to do? What do you do?’ I said, ‘Well I don’t know. We will work something out.’”
Into the Future – The Possibility of an Underworld Prequel: “I don’t know. I only heard about this the other day, and I hope so, because I am very keen on vampires. I am very keen on Len Wiseman, and I am very keen on Kate [Beckinsale] and the whole thing. I enjoyed being [in the movies].”
Nighy continued. “I was very pleased to be in the first two. I am very happy in this, that no one will ever put me in a prosthetics truck ever again. It is never going to happen. It is medieval, and it shouldn’t be allowed. I had six hours of makeup for Underworld 1 and one of the cool things about this film is that you just get a few dots on your face and you don’t have to do all that stuff. Apart from that, I am very keen on vampires. I have a soft spot [for them]. I have a thing about vampires.”
Bill Nighy’s Next Film is…: “Hot Fuzz. I have just done that. I am literally, like every other actor in England really, I pop in and out. Because everybody dug Shaun of the Dead” so bad, the boys are back, and they have got this script and it is called Hot Fuzz. It is basically city cop goes rural, and Simon [Pegg] plays the cop and it is stupidly funny. If you liked Shaun of the Dead, it is just stupid. They have got everyone in it, and I am in it for like 10 seconds. Jim Broadbent’s is in it - considerably in it.”
Does Nighy play a bad guy in Hot Fuzz? “No. Actually, I don’t know whether I am supposed to tell you this, but I am a very, very high ranking police officer. In fact, I think I outrank everybody – largely because I am older than everybody else.”
