Bill’s Brit baddie role is ‘groovy’

Jul 24 2009 by Kate Whiting, The Journal

Popular actor Bill Nighy gets into the groove of playing a bad guy but is still something of an enigma, as Kate Whiting reports

“I think it’s going to be a cracker! It’s a conspiracy thriller set in 1939 against a background of appeasement in pre-war Britain.

“So a really spooky, but effective piece, I think. I have high hopes for that.”

Also, later this year, he’ll star alongside Emily Blunt, Rupert Grint and Rupert Everett in Wild Target, in which he plays a lonely assassin.

And, with the latest Harry Potter now out, he’s looking ahead to starring in the forthcoming Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, as Minister for Magic Rufus Scrimgeour.

He admitted he was starting to think he was the only British actor of a certain age who hadn’t been cast in the franchise.

But ask Nighy about his take on British cinema and he’s stymied.

“I wish I could answer that, but I have no idea. I’m not being reluctant to answer the question, but I literally don’t get out much. I don’t know, for instance, who won the Oscars.

“I gave up newspapers apart from the football pages. I gave up TV as well and I don’t go to the cinema at all – I know I probably should, but I haven’t been for years.”

So what does he do to unwind? “I read, mostly, and listen to music. And I like to watch football... which is tricky. I haven’t watched football for a year unless I am in someone else’s house because I had to wean myself off television.

“The reason I gave it up is because I can’t survive it. It’s always three o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting here like this,” he says, pretending to channel surf on an imaginary remote control. “I can’t resist it, so I had to give it up.”

G-Force is out in cinemas next Friday, when there’ll be a review of the film on our Culture pages.

I improvise my life. I don’t have any sense of the future, or any sense of direction ... I have no rudder