Bill Nighy on & Sons, His Podcast, and Paris Dreams
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- Bill Nighy stars as reclusive novelist AN Dyer in & Sons, opposite Johnny Flynn, George MacKay, Imelda Staunton and Noah Jupe, in a story that pushes the dying-patriarch drama into 'science fiction' territory.
- Nighy, 76, hosts the podcast Ill-Advised — about to launch its third series with 300,000+ monthly listeners and named 2026 Podcast of the Year by the Broadcasting Press Guild — where he rambles unscripted as a 'soothing agony uncle.'
- Nighy earned his only Oscar nomination for Living (2022), playing a terminally ill bureaucrat, in a career best known for gentler, endearingly flawed characters like Billy Mack in Love Actually.
- Nighy says he once dreamed of being a novelist after his grammar-school English teacher Mr. Weir suggested it at age 14, then ran away to Paris, ended up begging on the Trocadéro, and pivoted to acting on someone else's suggestion.
- Nighy has a daughter, actor-director Mary Nighy, with ex-partner Diana Quick (together 27 years until 2008), and two grandchildren, and credits his parents' non-oppressive upbringing for shaping his own parenting.
- Nighy's early breakout was the 1991 BBC series The Men's Room, whose explicit scenes as a libidinous academic drew censure from the Broadcasting Standards Council — and a later endorsement from Cate Blanchett, who called him irresistible.
Why it matters: Nighy, at 76, is reframing a near-six-decade career with a passion project (& Sons) that lands him his dream role as a novelist and a podcast that has tripled into a genuine audience phenomenon — signalling that the actor long typecast as 'endearingly diffident' is actively choosing projects that reflect his own deferred literary ambitions.
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