Bill Nighy: The time of my life

Bill Nighy is currently wowing the nation in the political thriller State of Play. Once a theatrical love god, he's now cast as the ageing rocker or weary patriarch. He may get called 'raddled' but, he tells JOHN WALSH, age has its compensations

Bill Nighy is a little tired of people calling him "seedy". Ditto "hangdog". And "woebegone". Everyone who meets him, and looks at his handsome, actorish face, somehow fails to notice his clear blue eyes and sharp Aryan cheekbones; instead they go on about the furrowed brow, the Piranesi cross-hatching of crow's feet, the parchment skin stretched tight as a drum.

Perhaps as a defence mechanism against such impertinence, he is fantastically polite when you meet him. In the Café Delancey in Camden, he is gallant with the waitresses, solicitous that there may be too much whooshing espresso-machine noise for our tape recorder, carries my cup to another table, orders coffee ("thank you very much indeed"), orders mineral water ("if it's not too much trouble"), and beams a lot. He is polite to a hilariously fake degree, even to people who are unhealthily obsessed with his physiognomy.

"And 'raddled'," he says. "I get 'raddled' a lot. I suppose it's something to do with being lanky and having bones. My face is now complicated with age. You get used to arriving at auditions and finding that you're the oldest person there. Sometimes I look in the shaving mirror and think 'how could they cast me?' I don't do Love. I don't do Action. So I get the weary patriarch roles. It would be dreadful to be my age and not get the weary patriarch roles. I say: 'bring 'em on'. I worry that these parts will dry up, these lanky, shallow men who are a vague nuisance around women, or are looking back over their past and feeling desolate. I hope we don't run out of them because, frankly, I need the eggs."

So much for the terror of typecasting. Mr Nighy, let me remind you, is talking about having reached the ancient, positively Methuselan age of 53, but you can forgive him the vanity of lamenting his allegedly lost beauty. For years, he's been reliably cast as a series of dashing, untrustworthy, thirtysomething chaps in sharp suits. He rarely plays heroic figures - there's something about his weary elegance, the way he always wears his straw hair slicked back over the ears, which hints that he's probably a control freak, an emotional blank, a sadist - but he's absolute mustard at amoral chancers. Now that he's playing older amoral chancers, the telephone never stops ringing.

In the last three years, he's turned up on the big screen as Ray the combative crimper in Blow Dry, as a has-been rock star in Still Crazy, as a neurotic farmer in Lawless Heart, as a toff convict in Lucky Break. He was on stage at the National Theatre in Blue/Orange, that strange three-hander about race, madness and the NHS. Today, you can catch him on the multiplex circuit, playing Romola Garai's eccentric, blocked-writer father in I Capture the Castle. And every Sunday evening this month, he's been the best thing in State of Play, the best TV thriller to hit British screens since Edge of Darkness.

In it, Nighy plays Cameron Foster, editor of The Herald, whose reporters are investigating a scandal of murder, government corruption and oil-industry jiggery-pokery. Purse-lipped, sardonic and seen-it-all, Cameron has to keep a tight rein on his hot-headed chief hack, Cal (played by John Simm), and negotiate with his proprietor to keep the investigation afloat when the Cabinet spin doctors are trying to close it down. He's a wonderfully convincing newspaperman, leaking tabloid cheek at every turn, while editing a serious broadsheet and calling all the staff out after a fight with the management. He has the best jokes. When Cal faces imprisonment for perverting the course of justice, Cameron tells him: "The lawyer thinks he can get you bail, so I wouldn't take the anal sex for granted just yet..."

"It's gone down really well," Nighy tells me, with surprise in his voice. "I've had people coming up to me in the street, wanting to know the ending. I've had bus drivers hooting. And Paul Abbott's script was fantastic. I texted him the other day and said, 'Thanks very much - everyone thinks I'm very dry and witty'." He is lost in admiration for the screenwriter's art. "Abbott is just phenomenal. They lock him in a room for six weeks and give him just coffee and cigarettes and red wine, and he comes out withsix hours of TV..." He did not base the amoral Cameron on any particular journalist - not even Mick Brown, The Daily Telegraph feature writer who is his spitting image, "but I read his stuff in Sounds magazine when I was young - I was one of those guys who read the New Musical Express until I was 47 - and I heard a rumour that he comes from my town, Caterham in Surrey." (Brown is from nearby Coulsdon, in fact, but it's still a spooky coincidence.)

Playing an editor is a natural progression for a man who starred, years ago, as a new-bug tabloid journalist in Dreams of Leaving, David Hare's mid-Eighties TV drama about obsession and corruption in media London. It co-starred Kate Nelligan as a sexy femme fatale. "I'm glad you saw that. David Hare watched State of Play and sent me a card saying, 'I'm glad to see you've become Johnny Shannon [the paper's editor] and John Simm has become you.' But David, like me, was in love with the romantic idea of Fleet Street in the old days." Hare went on, at the time of the Wapping riots, to write Pravda, starring Anthony Hopkins as a hybrid of Murdoch and Maxwell, and Nighy as his Australian business manager. "It didn't go down well with the critics," said Nighy happily. "Bernard Levin called it 'meaningless drivel'. But it was a complete sell-out."

He refuses to consider himself a romantic lead. "That was never my area of expertise. I have an agent who was clever enough to put me up for other kinds of parts, early on. If I have a gift, it's in the character area, rather than trying to take myself seriously as a Love God." He purses his razor-thin lips. "I had a brief period when I was mistaken for somebody who might be good in bed" - he means The Men's Room, an intense sex drama in 1991 in which Nighy played a womanising head of department at a London University college who seduces Harriet Walter - "and there were nude scenes. I used to have conversations in the shops with people whom you just knew had seen your bum going up and down." His brief period in the sexy limelight didn't send him off the fidelity rails however - he's been married to the actress Diana Quick for ages, and their daughter, Mary, is nearly 19 and now at university, contemplating her own acting career.

For such a dashing, well-cut fellow, Nighy is curiously modest and insubstantial. He will tell you a hundred things that he's not, but hardly anything that he is. He will take on a dozen movies in a couple of years, but claim his selection of roles is dictated by nothing more profound than a desire to pay the mortgage or have a holiday. He has the intelligence, the fluency and grace to appear in Chekhov's The Seagull and Stoppard's Arcadia at the National, but refuses to embrace the classical repertoire because he may look silly in tights: "I mean it. I don't want to wear balloons with stockings coming out of them. I won't do it. I don't ever want to worry about where my sword is. Shakespeare is the finest poet that ever lived, but when it comes to jumping about performing him, I have minus interest." So he won't, in the immortal words of Ned Sherrin, be giving his Bottom in Regent's Park? "No. Or Coriolanus. I haven't got the legs."

Nighy's career has taken a vivid turn lately, with his casting as a vampire in the forthcoming Underworld. "They got Kate Beckinsale for it, so the movie got serious money. It's American, it was shot in Budapest, and I play a mad Austrian industrialist hell-bent on world domination. The make-up took six hours to put on, and two hours to take off, five people working away with these stiff brushes and 100 per cent alcohol. But then..." He looks terribly pleased about something. Eventually he comes out with it: "There is, I believe, going to be a plastic toy of the character I play..." It's a tiny form of immortality for an actor who seems never quite comfortable with what the world requires of him.

Nighy grew up in a flat over a garage in Caterham, where his father was works manager. "The house came with the job, so we lived in the body of the garage. When you opened the door, there were petrol pumps. The big smells of my childhood were Swarfega, oil and Marmite sandwiches." He himself seemed destined to spend his life lying under cars and explaining about head-gaskets. But at 15 he discovered Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald, read A Moveable Feast (Hemingway's memoir of their adventures by the Seine) and conceived a romantic plan to run away to Paris and write a novel.

He didn't make it, but worked for The Field magazine (his only brush with non-screen journalism) and applied to drama school because a girlfriend insisted he did so. Turned down by Rada, he went to the Guildhall School of Dance and Drama, but learnt more at the Liverpool Everyman, where he was part of a starry generation that included Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Jonathan Pryce and Pete Postlethwaite. Ask about his early days, and he'll tell you about music and books rather than acting. "I had a couple of very attentive teachers, and my whole thing was to be an author. The person who first drove me mad was Hemingway when I read his First 49 Stories. I read everything he ever wrote without knowing if it was 'good' - I had no critical context - but it got me really excited. And Bob Dylan's first album, I must have been 15 or 16 when I heard it. I couldn't believe the lyrics: 'See that my grave is kept clean', 'I feel like I'm fixin' to die...'. That early Mercury sound, that harmonica, A Moveable Feast, those things just kicked me out the door."

These days, he's the world's biggest Rolling Stones fan. He's just gone and bought the complete works, album by album, all over again in the re-mastered series. "In my trailer, I have the Stones for breakfast, the Stones all day. I just can't bring myself to put on anything else. I've just been listening to Goat's Head Soup, and the songs are just beautiful. They're the greatest rock'n'roll band the world has ever known, no question." And he's secretly tickled pink to hear a rumour that the Stones play a video of Nighy's 2001 film Still Crazy on their tour bus. In the film, Bill plays Ray, the washed-up lead singer of the re-formed glam-rock band Strange Fruit, resplendent in three-inch heels, skin-tight velvet flares and hair extensions. Amazingly, he's about to do it again for another new movie, Love Actually, the long-awaited directorial debut of Richard (Notting Hill) Curtis. Nighy plays another rock star, this time called Billy, who "has had better times professionally. But he's not a victim, he's not a terrible loser. The story is about him and his manager, and their relationship..." Typically, he is bowled over by Curtis. "He's a genius at writing whopping great profound jokes that work in films, and at making things romantic without making you feel sick. I think only a real believer in romance could pull that off."

So there's Bill Nighy at 53, playing ageing rock stars and ageless vampires, the epitome of the elegantly wasted English hedonist, for whom the whole business of performance and illusion is a way of making a living, and doesn't compare with the world of books and rock music that blew him away in his teens. "I've just been extremely lucky," he says more than once. "There's no film I've done that I now regret. Each was probably one of only three films being made in England at the time. And frankly, if you've always paid the rent, and raised a family, and done it solely by acting, that's some result." You look at this lean, perma-charming, unflappable man and think, gosh, he means it. Turning into the weary patriarch, the responsible parent, the matured rocker is more than a career move. It's his natural métier at last.

'State of Play' is on BBC1, 9pm, Sunday