The Oscar-nominated star, 74, said he applied for the Guildford School of Acting back in the day and was asked to prepare a monologue from a ‘modern play’ and a Shakespeare play for the audition.
While Nighy admitted to only applying to the school to ‘impress a girl,’ he was willing to go to great lengths to nail the audition.
Nighy told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life that him and a friend: ‘Stole the complete works of Shakespeare, and we stole the complete works of George Bernard Shaw which we thought was sort of modern.’
He went on to share that while borrowing the books were an option, for some reason stealing them just felt right.
He said: ‘We could have borrowed it like everybody else, but for some reason, we were sort of developing a criminal mentality.’
In a hilarious mix-up, Nighy ended up learning two female parts for the audition while at the pub with his friend, ending up performing the role of Eliza Doolittle from Shaw’s play Pygmalion, and the part of Cesario in Twelfth Night.
Cesario is actually the female protagonist of the play, Viola, dressed as a man – something Nighy didn’t realise at the time.
He laughed that the audition panel was obviously confused by his material choices but invited him back ‘with more suitable material,’ ultimately giving him a place on the course.
He admitted that ending up as an actor was something of a fluke, as he only pursued it to impress his romantic interest: ‘She could have said astronaut and I would have given it a shot.’
Given that Nighy didn’t at first take acting terribly seriously, he’s certainly carved out quite a career for himself, earning his first Oscar nomination for his role in Living last year.
Though the award went to Brendan Fraser for The Whale, Nighy’s moving performance is remembered as one of his best.
He opened up about his process for getting into character in a previous interview with Metro, explaining that for him, acting has never been as cerebral as others make it out to be.
He said: ‘It’s just work. I don’t mean to say that in order to diminish it, you’re not required to experience all these things, you’re just required to act them. Obviously, that’s what acting is!
‘It can be quite tiring but not emotionally tiring, it’s not like you have to feel this stuff. You have to kind of bogusly trigger your sensibility sometimes, or your tear ducts, to kind of trick them so you can give the appearance of someone who’s going through something. That’s my job. So I don’t have any difficulty, I’ve never had any difficulty.’
He went on to say that he’s not even sure he’s ever truly ‘been in character,’ explaining: ‘I’ve got to an age where I’m allowed to say certain things that you used to have to kind of not when you were younger, for instance being in character.
‘It’s a kind of joke but on the other hand it’s not, which is to say that if you ask me how to get into character, I’ve never knowingly been in character in my life. I’ve heard great things about it but it’s outside of my experience.
‘I go to work. I don’t know what it means, that phrase, really. I never have any difficulty shedding it because I don’t think I’ve ever been in it. So I don’t know what it means.’
Nighy has also previously said that he never did develop a taste for Shakespeare after his theft of the poet’s work, telling BBC Radio 4 that after only his second professional Shakespeare role (King Lear with Sir Anthony Hopkins at the National Theatre in London) he left the Bard behind for good.
He said: ‘I retired from Shakespeare sometime after that… nobody took a blind bit of notice, but I just thought, ‘I can’t go through this any more because I don’t have any particular interest in the delivery of Shakespeare’.
‘I understand he’s the greatest poet the world has ever known, but the performance of it, I will leave to other people.’