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A dying patriarch summons his brood for a dramatic announcement. It may not be the most original starting point for a movie, but & Sons adds an eccentric twist – one that it would be unfair to reveal here but which nudges the material into the realm of science fiction. The father in question is a revered novelist who is as reclusive as JD Salinger and as whiskery and dishevelled as Catweazle. Dormant for decades, the fictional AN Dyer is first glimpsed in a horizontal position on the sofa, refusing to come to the telephone: “I don’t do phonecalls,” he grumbles.
That is patently not true of the actor who plays him. “I spend a lot of time on the phone,” Bill Nighy says breezily. He is speaking to me from north-west London, where he has been nosing around bookshops. “I’m also an enthusiastic texter. I was always very quick on the old Nokia. Quite proud of myself, I was.” Where does he stand on emojis? “I used to be philosophically opposed. Most of them are a bit naff.” He then proceeds to list the exceptions. “I like the flamingo and the purple dahlia. I like the leaping shark. Sometimes I combine it with the leaping dolphin. Very occasionally, I like the golfer in mid-swing if I’m congratulating someone. I don’t do smiley faces.”
Communicating over Zoom is a no-go, hence our phone conversation today. “It got to the point where every time I had a Zoom call, it made me unhappy. I’m old enough to be able to say, ‘Can I retire from Zoom?’” At 76, he has ruled out other undesirable experiences. “Food where you talk about work. That’s one. Particularly lunch. You have to sit there for so long and it just confuses the issue. Working lunches are absolutely out of the question now.” He has never been much of a partygoer either, and used to get what he calls “a thrill, or a kind of anti-thrill” from putting invitations, especially highly prized ones, straight in the bin. When I ask if there is any one thing that is likely to make him turn down an acting job, his answer is instant and unequivocal: “Togas.”
No such garments in & Sons, which pits Nighy as Dyer against his vexed older offspring (played by Johnny Flynn and George MacKay) and the ex-wife (Imelda Staunton) who has never forgiven him for siring a son (Hamnet’s Noah Jupe) by another woman. The old man has been an abrasive and emotionally absent parent, but appears to believe his literary talent excuses that. Nighy has no time for such guff. “It’s like when footballers behave badly on the pitch and people say, ‘Temperament is part of his genius.’ Give me a break. That’s anathema to me. I don’t believe it in the least.”
Dyer claims his goal as a father was to “do no harm”. Nighy himself has a daughter – the actor-director Mary Nighy – by his ex-partner, the actor Diana Quick, whom he was with for 27 years until 2008. Did he start out with a parenting philosophy? “Blimey, Ryan. It’s a long time ago.” Indeed: he has two grandchildren now. “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. My parents were not oppressive or unkind, and I didn’t want to be either.”
Unkindness is fully part of Dyer’s repertoire in & Sons, along with rage and misanthropy – none of them qualities that Nighy is typically asked to play. “I’m not thought of in those terms,” he agrees. “Though of course, half my work is not in living memory. You get to the stage where everyone who watched it is dead.”
Strangers still commend him on his performance as the unvarnished ex-rocker Billy Mack, who blithely admits that his new Christmas single is a “festering turd”, in Richard Curtis’s 2003 romcom Love Actually. Nighy has made his share of blockbusters, including two voyages with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, where he was hidden behind a beard of writhing, computer-generated tentacles. But it is the gentler figures, endearingly flawed, for which he is truly cherished, whether bracingly frank like Billy or sweetly diffident: the terminally ill, buttoned-up bureaucrat in Living, which earned the actor his only Oscar nomination to date; the husband who chickens out of cheating on his wife in Lawless Heart; or the Scrabble enthusiast searching for his missing son in Sometimes Always Never.
Don’t count him out as a sex symbol either. One early success was The Men’s Room, the raunchy 1991 BBC series in which his explicit scenes as a libidinous academic earned the censure of the Broadcasting Standards Council. After playing Nighy’s wife in Notes on a Scandal, Cate Blanchett asked a journalist: “What thinking western woman do you know who wouldn’t want to embrace him?”
If he is typecast today, it doesn’t faze him. “Maybe there are people out there who like it when I do the things I always do. Just like I always want Steve McQueen to do what he does.” What has Nighy learned from the minimalist star of The Great Escape? “That I’ll never be Steve McQueen,” he sighs. “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. “Everything Prince did was attractive. Anyone who can do the splits and come back up on the backbeat … well, I’ll follow them anywhere.”
It was writers who were the object of his youthful idolatry: Hemingway, Fitzgerald. There is a special poignancy, then, in seeing Nighy as a novelist in & Sons, since that is what he wanted to be for many years. Blame Mr Weir, the English teacher at his Catholic grammar school. “He told me, ‘You might want to try your hand at the novel.’ I must have been 14. I’m not claiming this as an early sign of my neglected genius. But it was like a bomb going off in my head.”
At 15, he got a job on The Field, the hunting and fishing magazine. What were his responsibilities? “I changed the roller towel in the ladies’ room. All the girls from the typing pool used to come in. Not because of my animal magnetism, I hasten to add, but because they knew they could make me blush. Those roller towels are quite tricky. I’d bugger it up and they’d start laughing.”
Then there was the day he landed in trouble with the boss. “I’m from a small town – Caterham in Surrey – and I used to become very excited if I saw a Roller or a Bentley in the street. I got pulled up in front of the CEO because he’d driven past me and I’d started jumping up and down and waving. He said, ‘That’s not what I expect from an employee.’”
Nighy’s next stop was Paris. “I am a walking, talking cliche,” he says. “I ran away to be a writer. Like a million others, I went straight to [the bookshop] 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.” He didn’t relinquish his literary dreams so much as let them wilt. “Someone suggested I go to drama school, and that became what I did. I thought I’d get around to writing eventually. I’m still thinking it. I’m just very good at procrastination.”
He may not have a novel in the works but a kind of verbal memoir is unspooling, 25 minutes at a time, in the form of his podcast, Ill-Advised, in which he serves as a soothing agony uncle, meanderingly answering listeners’ queries about everything from fashion to avoiding social faux pas. Off-the-cuff being his preferred mode, 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. I’ve already thought about trousers, for instance, because I’m a bit of a fetishist about lounge suits and shirt collars.”
Ill-Advised, which is about to launch its third series, has more than 300,000 monthly listeners and was named 2026 Podcast of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild. That doesn’t stop Nighy being comically apologetic about it. “I tried not to have a podcast,” he assures me, giving the impression, as he usually does, that he has secured his tremendous career and the esteem of audiences, critics and contemporaries simply by the happy accident of stepping off the lift at the wrong floor. Perhaps he won’t ever be mistaken for Steve McQueen. His compliments about that actor, though, could plainly be applied to him, too. No fireworks, no reaching for prizes. A master of reckless restraint.
