Talking to Bill Nighy about his star turn as a frail and at times broken novelist in & Sons is rather hampered by the British actor not having seen director Pablo Trapero’s father-and-son drama on a screen of any size ahead of its world premiere on Sunday at the Toronto Film Festival.
Nor does the Love Actually star plan a viewing, because Nighy, admitting to crippling bouts of screen fright, has long refused to view any of his performances, alone or alongside audiences. Since his youth, in fact.
“I never watch the films. I go to great lengths to never be exposed to any of it. I am committed to never laying eyes on myself performing,” Nighy revealed to The Hollywood Reporter about halfway through an interview. Nighy was even anxious seeing himself in character with a shaggy mane and an unusually long beard reflected back to his eyes on the & Sons set.
“Occasionally, I would catch sight of myself in a mirror and think, good God, is that me?” he recalled. Nighy’s condition even extends to voice work during a film’s edit, when he re-records dialogue in a studio. “I don’t do it to picture. I do it audio,” he recalls.
The English actor has little concern over how he looks and how he sounds in real life. He just prefers leaving judgment of his performances to audiences.
“It’s the acting I can’t bear. I find it unacceptable. I have difficulty persuading myself I can do my job anyway, without having hard evidence presented to me that I’m correct,” Nighy argues. He was full of praise for the & Sons script co-written by Sarah Polley and adapted from the novel by David Gilbert.
And he recounts being “in safe hands” as Trapero directed him in the role of A.N. Dyer, the aging and star novelist who, having fallen over the years into an abyss of seeming madness, suddenly wants to reconcile with his two eldest and estranged sons, played by Johnny Flynn and George MacKay. Nor has he been in contact with his ex-wife, Isabel, played by Imelda Staunton.
Predictably, their reunion goes horribly wrong, especially when Dyer, in scenes of histrionics and angry outbursts, croaks out to his eldest sons a secret about their half-brother, Andy Jr., played by Noah Jupe. Besides turning his family’s world upside down, everyone around Dyer is left to question whether what he has revealed to them is true or just a mad fantasy.
But explaining Dyer’s motivations in the face of a disintegrating family portrayed in & Sons remains a bit of an uphill climb for Nighy. “It’s difficult to express, because I don’t quite know how the film has been edited,” he says at one point with his trademark deadpan delivery.
He ventures Dyer has long grieved for the wife he lost after what the audience early on assumed was an affair that led to the birth of half-brother Andy. “What he really wants is his wife back. The central fact for him is the grief he feels at losing his wife. Above all else, that’s the thing that pins him to the floor, the things he just can’t recover from,” Nighy says of scenes of distressing intimacy between Dyer and his ex-wife in & Sons.
Dyer, followed by Trapero’s camera, spends virtually all of the film strutting around his home with a feral animal energy, especially in a writers room from which he has barely left in two decades, or written a word on a page.
Nighy says he has known many notable British writers in real life, and adds he understands Dyer’s reclusive nature and his end-of-life regrets, as many real-life writers feel towards the end of their own lives that they had spent too little time with their family or the outside world.
“The thing about being a writer is you go to a room and you stay there and, for the most part, you don’t want to be disturbed. And the priority of your life is what happens in that room,” he explains. “However much you love your children or however much you value your family, the danger is what happens in the room in terms of your work becomes the runaway priority. Although you’re in the house, your children are neglected. So they never have a traditional family atmosphere,” Nighy adds.
All of which helps explain the anguished reunion in & Sons that Dyer has with his eldest sons, Richard and Jamie, and his ex-wife when he attempts to make amends. His goal is to build a support system for Andy, the half-brother, after Dyer has died and despite past family ruptures.
For Nighy’s character, young Andy has become the legacy of a man left broken by illness and age after years of excessive drinking. “He has been rendered irrational by substance abuse. So there is no logic or any rational decisions made. He’s in much more trouble than that,” the actor explains.
Ultimately, & Sons, for all its grim family in-fighting and accusations, is a film about legacy, identity, loss and love. The drama, a Canada-UK co-production, will have a world premiere in Toronto on Sept. 7 at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.
