In the Tesco my eye falls on a headline on a women’s magazine I would normally really never buy. It’s a glossy, and I hate glossies. I couldn’t care less about fashion, shopping, beauty, what size of clothes you are supposed to wear and how to paint your nails pomegranate red.
But this glossy had a headline on it that made me grab it.
“Bill Nighy – boy does he rock”
I started reading right there and didn’t hear nor notice anything around me for about 10 minutes, indulging every word. Much of the stuff in there I already know. There is no Bill Nighy interview where he doesn’t mention Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Nor is there an interview where he not mentions that he feels so very lucky to get the roles he is getting. Any director getting him to play in his film is the lucky one, I’d say.
But apart from all the stuff I already know about him, every interview I read with him has guaranteed some expressions in it that crack me up. This time wasn’t any different. I was laughing out loud in the Tesco, people started looking.
5 Bill Nighy quotes that are so unmistakeably Bill Nighy:
“I’m a fetishist for what I like to refer to as “the lounge suit”. It amuses me that it’s a suit you might wear “in the lounge” wherever that might be.”
“I’m not man enough for silk, frankly. Pink makes me uneasy. I am the wrong colour, and as a mousy haired person, I fear yellow with all my heart. I will even try to avoid standing near anyone wearing it.”
“I am a packaging freak. When people give me gifts, and the packing is particularly …superior they remain unwrapped because I know whatever they contain wouldn’t give as much satisfaction as the packaging does.”
“I’m not famous for holiday-making. I don’t really understand it,” he says. “Apparently, it is now compulsory to wear shorts – and yet there are only three people in the world who should wear them and I’m not sure who they are.”
About wanting to dance in a movie:
“.. I’m not trained like Mr. Walken (one of his favourite actors) who’s been dancing since childhood. In Pennies from Heaven he does an absolutely stunning striptease dance as a gangster in a bar, quite apart from the fact that he is one of the greatest actors working in the world right now. It’s like wow… Did I really just say “It’s like wow” ?
I read it. I read it again, I give up on my principles, and buy this silly magazine for this one interview, and those awesome pictures of BIll standing on a big leather chair (yes standing) in Trump tower in New York. Cup of Yorkshire tea in his hand (he doesn’t go anywhere without it), in the background Central Park and a part of the skyline of New York. That’s at least 3 awesome things in one picture. He is clever, intelligent, very witty and an absolute style icon as well.
It was just what I needed to get my mind of things a bit, because I am a tad nervous. Which is through some strange twist of fate to blame on him as well.
Bill Nighy – it’s like wow …
Did I really just say “It’s like wow” ?
Yes I did, and I mean it too.
Hihi. Ja, hij is Leuk :-) Heel erg.
he really does take one’s breath away, doesn’t he? [it was a good thing that your eye fell on that – Ah and, by the way, I’m still typing weird here ;) ]
Yes, I can’t see Bill in shorts somehow. I have a vision of him in his lounge suit in a deckchair on a beach somewhere!
I think I remember having read somewhere that he doesn’t like sand either, he is not a beach boy! But a deckchair somewhere else with a book, sunglasses and a hat might be the thing.
And he is back in London, which is a good thing. Now let them bring on that play!
Not to mention the brilliant:
‘I used to think that prizes were demeaning and divisive, until I got one, and now they seem sort of meaningful and real’.