On Bill Nighy at the Coffee Shop
A Master's in Stalking
As my degree slowly comes to a close, I have begun sifting through some of my coursework. I wrote the following for David Roper’s popular culture course, a specialism which he has taught at City for 40 years.
The assignment was to interview a celebrity, and with a week to the deadline, I was short for time and, unfortunately, short for celebrities. What I did have was a mediocre coffee shop frequented by an icon, that’s the best I could do, and I was sure that I had failed given the lack of dialogue.
In feedback, I was surprised to read that it was, in fact, “a masterpiece of observation and description”. So I present to you a “wonderful, delicate, and charmant” stalker piece on my local celebrity.
Coffee with Bill Nighy: London’s most normal celebrity
20 February 2025
It is a disgustingly gloomy day outside Victoria Station. Westminster Cathedral looms over the feces littered pavements as pigeons scuttle around ingesting cigarette butts. There are much nicer places to be in London for an ageing celebrity; Hampstead Heath, perhaps, or Primrose Hill. But Bill Nighy saunters around these streets swaddled up in wool coats and woven scarves as if plucked from the pages of a Dickens novel. These besmirched grounds are the ones he has chosen to sail his shiny shoes across, and sail he does.
Fortunately, Bill’s choice of residence and attitude towards public appearances make it so that I, and my neighbours, observe him frequently and from close range, like a rare bird who’s set up a nest on the windowsill, slowly becoming familiar in his normalcy. He minds his business, he gets his coffee, he reads his books. It’s as if the fashioning of his world can be grasped from inside the confines of his chosen cafe, arguably the worst on the block.
This is the story of Bill Nighy through the window of the coffee shop, undisturbed:
Wedged between a used camera store and a densely overstocked vintage hole in the wall is a black storefront with kitschy, white, flowery designs and LED-lined logos. It’s the best of what you might find at the airport when nothing else is open. Average, but acceptable with the smell of ham and cheese wafting from the mildly hot panini press and chocolate powder staining the rims of the wide blue mugs at each circular, steel table. Nearly every face is lit by the invasive radiance of a busy person’s screen. Too tired to go into the office, too restless to work from home, they choose to respond to emails here. Except for him, he reads.
In fact, it looks like he’s been reading for the entirety of the three quarters of a century that he’s been with us. His eyes may have glanced over every line hoarded in the British Library’s archives, and yet they have not darkened from the atrocities he no doubt has investigated on each page. They are light, blue as the teal mug that hides behind his paper. And despite the skin under his eyes beginning to slump toward his mouth, his perpetually confused squint and his brows ever so slightly putting pressure on the eyelids; the eye itself refuses to sink into his head. As if every line he reads, they force themselves to come forward just a bit more, ensuring that they are dancing with the true message of the prose. Ever so serious.
His hands flip through the pages with a delicate, almost precarious flick, his fingers curled in a constant, involuntary bend. It's the thing that sets him apart from the ideal cliche of an Englishman at a certain age. Confronting, really, as he seems to point right at you with every move he makes. Not his fault. The painless Dupuytren’s contracture just makes him all the more recognisable, or relatable, as he bonds with neighbours over similar diagnoses, exchanging doctors’ numbers and learning each other's names just to check in at that same coffee shop every other week or so. The people’s prince, one might say.
And he walks that way, like the people’s prince, towering over you with his slender frame, hunching to bring him closer to the level of his pupils. His stature is almost wire-like, bending and tilting, leaning his head nearer to the direction of sound to ensure maximum listening power. He adjusts his scarf with the precision of someone folding a love letter, with a deliberate, almost ceremonious twist. When a patron stumbles through the door frame, he lifts his eyes over the rim of his book, offering a dry, imperceptible smirk - the kind that says he’s catalogued the moment, filed it away somewhere between irony and empathy.
He shouldn’t be mistaken for someone who knows exactly what is going on, though. It’s a common misconception, he says, that just because of one's vintage, they might have all of the answers. Nevertheless, he is effortless at pretending that he does hold the secret, perhaps that’s how he’s successfully pocketed a lifetime's supply of jobs on the silver screen.
Draped over the metal chair, he makes the executive decision to lift himself closer to the heavens. He folds his paper and wedges his book into the nook of his armpit. With a final sip from his now cold coffee, he twists his scarf around once more and is suddenly short for time. With a nod to the cashier and the familiar jingle of the door, he sweeps back down the pavement to continue on into his world and out of ours, maybe to be seen tomorrow, certainly the next day.
