THE NEW YORKER: Bill Nighy's Obsessions, Onscreen and Off
June 29, 2020
On a recent Friday, the British actor Bill Nighy, answering a FaceTime call in his “kitchen-cum-front-room, at home, in England,” stood up to pause the music he was listening to: a song by the twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Rachel Chinouriri. “I found her in a Shazam, in a shop,” he said. He’d added her to a playlist he’d made, which included Alicia Keys, D’Angelo, and Mary J. Blige. “There aren’t that many people who make your heart go boom,” he said. “Mary J. Blige is one of them.” Nighy, who is seventy, wore eyeglasses, a navy V-neck sweater—“I used to be a bit squeamish about V-neck jumpers, but I’m much more relaxed now; they have to be very small and they have to be neat and they have to be navy blue”—and a white button-down shirt. “I had nothing but blue shirts, so I made a conscious decision to get out of that trap,” he said. “The look is—I suppose we’re going for a well-turned-out librarian. Librarian chic.”
