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HBO:
How did you get involved with the project?
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Bill Nighy as Lawrence in The Girl in the Café.
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Bill Nighy:
Well, I read the script and it took me about three seconds to heartily agree to be involved. The script is a cracker, as you'd expect from Richard Curtis who is kind of world-class in this area. It's extremely funny, I hope. Otherwise, I'm going to kill myself.
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"It's a part that I haven't been asked to play recently in as much as I play a rather reserved gentleman. Meek is how he's described. He's kind of pathologically shy, as a result of which, he's led a kind of lonesome existence."
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— Bill Nighy
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And it's romantic, as you'd also expect. Uh, again, if it's not I'll have to kill myself. But, I'm assured that it's going okay. It's also, I hope, quite affecting and touching and moving. But I had no hesitation in being involved. It's a wonderful part. It's a part that I haven't been asked to play recently in as much as I play a rather reserved gentleman. Meek is how he's described. He's kind of pathologically shy, as a result of which, he's led a kind of lonesome existence.
And within the course of the film the sky clears for a moment and he's joined in a rather unlikely fashion by an extremely, wonderful and glamorous young lady.
And it has a fun, profound effect upon him, which, hopefully, will be amusing to watch.
He is incapacitated by the yearning, the longing, and the fundamental desire that he feels, and I don't think it even gets as far as the promise or the hope of any sexual contact. I think it's just the fact that he gets to breathe the same air is intensely glamorous for him. And should she ever touch his face, he might cry. It's just out of his range of experience and therefore powerful in a way that regular folk probably can't grasp unless they watch the movie.
HBO:
From an actor's point of view, how does the writing help you in your performance?
Bill Nighy:
Richard Curtis writes dialogue which isn't entirely 'naturalistic' because, of course, there is no such thing. And it has not only a deeply satisfying comic spin, it also has a kind of poetic, very English spin which I find particularly thrilling.
HBO:
How has it been working with Kelly Macdonald?
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Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald in The Girl in the Café.
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Bill Nighy:
Kelly is completely dreamy to work with. She is deeply gifted and very, very intuitive and very funny and incredibly beautiful, and sexy and wonderful. And that's about - enough about her. [LAUGHS] and I should thank my lucky stars.
HBO:
Were you aware before you got involved with the issues addressed in the film?
Bill Nighy:
I was aware of it from the moment your grandmother says you better finish what's on your plate because there are millions of children starving all over the world. But I had the same relationship with it that I see in most of the people around me, which is that somehow we get through the day with that kind of information, and we somehow arrange to do absolutely nothing about it.
Bill Nighy:
I have somehow managed throughout my whole life to do very, very little to help. I knew that Africa was the emergency, but I didn't know quite how urgent the situation was. I didn't know that thirty thousand children die every day. I didn't know that every three seconds a child who absolutely shouldn't die, dies. I didn't know that.
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"Obviously there is a message, and do you feel any kind of responsibility or any pressure because of that? I laugh because yes I do, I do feel a unique responsibility, and a unique degree of pressure, because you want very passionately to get it right." |
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— Bill Nighy
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I didn't know that since we started this interview, god knows how many children have died. And so when people say, it's a complicated issue, that's almost three seconds. I should think by the time they've finished saying, It's a complicated situation, a child's dead. And I think if they perhaps came from somewhere else in the world, it wouldn't be so complicated.
Obviously there is a message, and do you feel any kind of responsibility or any pressure because of that? I laugh because yes I do, I do feel a unique responsibility, and a unique degree of pressure, because you want very passionately to get it right. I didn't sleep for the first week. But then I often don't sleep for the first week. But in this case I suppose it was twice as bad.
But the expectation therefore is quite high, and when the expectation is high the pressure is great. But mostly, the pressure is not to mess it up because you want it to deliver in a way that you don't normally want movies to deliver, you want this one to deliver one thousand percent.
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