Richard Curtis helped leading man Nighy perfect wedding speech

Actor Bill Nighy will be forever grateful to writer/director pal Richard Curtis for helping him deliver one of the best wedding speeches ever. The British actor, who has teamed up with Curtis for The Girl in the Cafe, Love Actually and Pirate Radio, among other movies, asked his friend to help him with a “pivotal speech” he was asked to deliver at another pal’s wedding – and the filmmaker delivered perfection in just 24 hours.
Nighy tells WENN, “I could do the serious bit but I knew I had to have some jokes. I texted Richard Curtis and he said, ‘Tell me a couple of things about the groom’. I said he left home at 14 to be a roadie for a heavy metal band called Saxon.
“The next day in text form on my phone came this blinding speech. He’d (Curtis) been through the whole discography of Saxon and attached a joke to every single song title down to their last album, called Release The Beast. And he said, ‘I’m going to have to ask that of the bride in the morning!’
“I did declare that these jokes came directly from Richard Curtis because I couldn’t claim them as my own. He saved me big.”