Bill Nighy Quotes

When it comes to casual clothing, my enthusiasm for clothes starts to waver.

I have never owned a computer. I am one of those weirdos. I've never needed a computer. I'm lucky that I have a job where I'm not required to use one.

There is something, yeah, I mean traditionally it's more fun to play bad guys than it is good guys and when you're playing a bad guy, yeah, the fun in it is to see how scary you can be, how horrible you can be. And it's surprising what you come up with.

Opening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'

I hardly even leave my own house.

The way the elderly are treated, and in some cases warehoused and medicated, rather than nurtured and listened to, is distressing.

I don't think there's an improvised word in the movie. I hope not because I admire writing. Improvising is kind of gambling. It's just that you're standing up.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

I'm lucky that I get to play a wide variety of parts.

I'm not a World War II buff. I know a little bit about it, I was taught the other side of the story in school, so it was unfamiliar to me, the idea of a German resistance, and yet it was considerable.

I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.

From my point of view, it's very refreshing to play a regular human being and not someone from another dimension. When I say "not act," what I mean is just to be as natural and as normal as possible.

I'm just aware of what I'm thinking and feeling but I do obviously have to get that to the back of the auditorium. So there are things like projection and filling the room, and not dropping the ends of lines - technical things which are important, but I don't think they change the way I feel in a scene.

I never watch my own films.

Often in America people would assume that [as an English actor] you've had some sort of deep, classical training, or that you're a Shakespeare enthusiast. I have zero interest in me performing Shakespeare.

I wanted to be a journalist, I thought it was glamorous and that I'd meet beautiful women in the rain.

More people saw me in 'Love Actually' than had seen me in everything else I had ever done up to that point.

I like being in kids' movies, and I like being in family movies.

There are only three men in the world who are licensed to wear shorts: Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Tom Cruise.

When you are in something that you're proud of and it's funny and it's a good night out and all of those things, there's nothing quite like it. The rewards are proportionate to the amount of alarm and distress it causes you.

I'm a jacket man. And if I'm without one, I am kind of seriously disabled. I don't know how to operate in shirt sleeves.

The job is the same - to attempt to make it sound like you've never said it before and as if it's just occurred to you. And that's the same whether you're on camera or whether you're on stage in a room full of people.

If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.

I don't do plays without jokes anymore. I've retired from those plays. I think it's bad manners to invite people to sit in the dark for two and a half hours and not tell them the joke.

It can't be overstated how wonderful it is not to have to audition any more. Any actor will tell you, it's like Christmas.

You get older and you see yourself and say, 'God, he's old, who's that?'

I never mind doing press; it's never bothered me.

One of the reasons I like a suit is because I've never been that keen on my body. The shape a suit presents is always going to be better than anything I can do.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.

In the street, people talk to you about all kinds of things, but by far, the most number of people talk to me about Love, Actually.

I never go on the net or the web, or whatever it's called.

I am a fan of rehearsal. I like doing it [scene] over and over and over and over until it looks like you never did it before.

I was never a hippy, per se.

Actors always talk about taking their work home and I always think: 'What are you on? You just turn it off. You are at work and then you go home.'

I did pick up a guitar once, but the strings hurt my fingers so I put it down again.

Jerry Bruckheimer says that he makes films that he would want to see, and it seems that that coincides with what a lot of people want to see.

I have no memory, any at all, of actually performing the play, no recall in terms of the lines. I can't tell you any line from any play I've ever done.

I'm not good at watching myself which I think is perfectly natural. I don't give myself a hard time about it. I am the worst critic.

One of the things that is assumed about actors is that they are extrovert, which is almost never the case, in my experience.

I'm crazy about James Brown. I'm crazy about soul music. And then the blues. Rhythm and blues.

You can ruin your life wanting to be an actor.

When you've been going on about something for a while, it is always satisfying to discover that other people agree with you.

I've worked with Len Wiseman before, on the 'Underworld' series, in which I was a vampire. The first two of those were his first two films. And I admire him beyond measure. I think he's tremendous, as a man and as a director.

The degree of notoriety I have is fine and easy. There's nothing hysterical about it.

I used to joke that one of the reasons there was a lack of classical work on my CV was because I couldn't operate in those kinds of trousers. Which is a joke, but it's actually also true - if I want to appear in public I want to look my best. If I'm onstage I like to do contemporary work, largely because of the trousers, because of the clothes. I like a decent, what we used to call a lounge suit. Then I can start to motor.

My dad had a personal style which was very attractive. It was quite reserved and quite elegant, and it was infectious.

I've never been a great enthusiast about how I look and I am very ... when I was young I had a real anti-talent for inventing myself as unappealing - craven and unremarkable.

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans.

Somebody asked me recently, 'Have you done a lot of plays?' I thought hang on. I used to do nothing but plays. I've been very fortunate that on several occasions I've had jobs where I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world whatever you had to offer - however much money you've got.

I don't want to associate myself with any specific group of politicians.

I love playing half squid/half crab guy because you can get away with a level of acting that if you tried it anywhere else they'd arrest you for crimes against acting.

It's more than usually possible that I won't do a play again. But Skylight is one of the great plays in the English language. I was lucky enough to be a part of it at one point in its life, and it's a timely thing to deliver it again in the modern world.

To be serious, the things you really want to relive are things like bedtime with your daughter when she becomes incredibly entertaining 'cause she doesn't want to go to sleep. They're at their most enchanting 'cause they just want to put it off, so they do a cabaret for you. You sit there thinking, "Please don't let this end."

I'm probably the only person who actually remembers pirate radio.

It's probably healthier to find fame later in life.

I don't spend a lot of time with anybody.

One of my great regrets, and I don't have many, is that I spent too long putting people's status and reputation ahead of their more important qualities. I learned far too late in life that a long list of letters after someone's name is no guarantee of compassion, kindness, humour, all the far more relevant stuff.

If you ever see me in a social setting wearing any sort of sportswear, then you know I'm in crisis.

I'm not a royal family watcher.

I used to think that prizes were damaging and divisive, until I got one. And now they seem sort of meaningful and real.

I did actually sit down with a blank sheet of paper once. I think the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

I love imaginative representations of a possible near-future, where you look at the technology and you think, "Well, yeah, that could really nearly be true." I like those kinds of backgrounds.

I do think 3D has seriously improved, since I was a boy. It's fabulous.

I like American black soul music, that was my first big enthusiasm.

I really have no interest in delivering the iambic pentameter, I just want to kill myself. I don't mind other people doing it. I say that, but really I don't want to watch other people doing it. I get embarrassed.

A way of describing performances that I admire is that there is an absence of careerism. It's a clumsy way of describing it but it sort of does it for me.

If you are supposed to be villainous and have some sort of agenda, I like the idea of delivering that kind of character in a perfectly well-mannered way.

You tell yourself that you're not auditioning but of course you work like crazy, and you prepare like mad. And you think, "Well, I won't get that job. But maybe they'll have another job sometime, and they'll remember that I was good."

You have all these plans to act, and maybe do it rather elegantly, and then they turn the rain machine on.

I would like to change everything, but obviously not everything. I've been incredibly fortunate. I guess everybody would do this, but I'd go back to my younger self and say, "Lighten up. Take it easy. Relax. Don't be so anxious about everything. Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow."