In life, if you have an enthusiasm for what they call ‘good manners,’ sometimes people don’t quite believe you. I’ve had that once or twice before, where they assume you can’t be for real.
BILL NIGHYSomebody asked me recently, ‘Have you done a lot of plays?’ I thought hang on. .
More Bill Nighy Quotes
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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.
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Whatever you do, don’t smoke’. I have had to recover from that and been lucky that I have been able to stop.
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I find it hard to relax around any man who’s got the second button on his shirt undone.
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I don’t even own a car.
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I quoted David Hare one of his lines the other day to illuminate whatever point we were trying to make in the conversation, and I said ‘What play was that?’ and he said ‘It was your line, you said it about a hundred and fifty times in The Vertical Hour.’
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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.
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Standing in front of a fake mountain with fake snow falling and seven girls dressed as Santarettes will stay in my memory.
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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.”
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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.’
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Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it’s not exclusive to the Germans.
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If I ruled the world, every woman would have a Chanel suit in her wardrobe.
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All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.
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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.
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I got briefly mistaken for someone who might be good in bed, which was very, very good.
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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.
BILL NIGHY







