In the film Living, which also features Aimee Lou Wood from Sex Education, an elderly man is told he has an incurable illness and decides to start living his life to the fullest.
His roles in films like Love Actually and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy have made him one of the most beloved actors in this country.
Critics have speculated that Living could be Bill Nighy’s finest work and that it could be nominated for an Oscar next year.
It is a remake of the 1952 Japanese classic Ikiru, and Nighy plays Mr. Williams, a lifelong bureaucrat who learns he has a fatal illness.
He then decides to alter his behavior and begin living life to the fullest.
“It was pretty intimidating the first time I met Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro; it was his notion that he’d wanted to relocate the [original] film from Tokyo to London for some time.
“When we met, he put it together with me, which was a wonderful development for me, and he then agreed to create the script.
“Oliver Hermanus, whose previous picture we had watched, Moffie, which he shot with Jamie Ramsay, the cinematographer for this project, came as a bundle, and they turned out to be wonderful, so the whole thing was extremely appealing.”
Nighy noted that the film’s central theme is “procrastination,” which is something that “everyone deals with.”
He stated, “The film argues that it is merely an illustration of how you can reject it, genuinely get things done, and give your life meaning rather than not.”
And whereas Mr. Williams in the film contemplates his legacy before his impending demise, Nighy argues that he is not worried about his own.
He told Backstage, “I don’t think I fully accept that I’m going to die.”
I feel I am not alone in my skepticism.
“However, I do not consider my legacy. I used to believe that my films would air at 3 a.m. when people were awake but unable to sleep. And they would say, “Oh, there’s that guy. What is his moniker? He appeared in that other film you recall’… But now they simply Google it, and it will be digital. Everything will be streamed, but no.”
