James Nesbitt thrusts his hands in his pockets and grins. “She is goooorrrrrgeous, isn’t she?” he asks, rolling the words around in his mouth and finally setting them free in his distinctive Northern Irish brogue. “Sometimes I think people recognise me and are looking at me as I drive along. Then I realise they recognise the car, and are really looking at it.”
The star of Cold Feet and, more recently, Murphy’s Law is talking about his silver Audi RS6 estate, less than a year old and his latest pride and joy. “I just stand outside the house and stare at it,�� he says. “Sometimes I even just go and sit in it.”
For someone who confesses to knowing very little about cars, Nesbitt seems to have been bitten by the motoring bug. He claims never to have been particularly bothered about what he has driven in the past or by what other people have thought of his motor. After all, he points out, he learnt to drive in what must be the most unfashionable car on the planet: his schoolteacher father’s Lada. He stalled it all around the streets of Coleraine, County Londonderry.
“I was never actually that embarrassed about driving the Lada,” he says. “At 17, driving is so cool that you don’t really care what it is that you are driving at all.”
The only car that he ever really lusted after was his mother’s old Riley Elf. “It was like a Mini, but stuck out more at the back. It was a beautiful car, with a really perfect interior,” he remembers. “My mum probably wrecked it, though — she was convinced that she saved a lot of petrol money by turning the engine off and freewheeling down the hill in it.”
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His indifference to cars was also reflected in the fact that as a young actor trying to make his way in London he was forced to make do with whatever was available — invariably the cast-offs of other actors. And even then it wasn’t until he was 26 that he managed to scrape enough money together to buy his first car. “It was a huge old beige Citroën estate, which I bought from Arabella Weir (the comedian who would later appear in The Fast Show) who I had been in a play with. It was so old and knackered that you had to climb in through the window.”
Three years later, he acquired his mother’s old Ford Fiesta, which he drove to London from Northern Ireland. “On day two, Sonia (his then girlfriend, now his wife) drove it into a bus in Camberwell, so that was the end of that,” he says.
Nesbitt, 39, who is enjoying a summer break from filming while learning his lines for a new, as yet unnamed Woody Allen film, claims to never have had a crash himself. “I’m just very, very good,” he says, his green eyes twinkling.
However, he is ungraciously quick to recount Sonia’s motoring misadventures. Not only did she crash the Fiesta but she has yet to get to grips with the congestion charge in central London. “Only today, I have to pay two congestion charge fines, each of £80, because of her,” he mock-complains. “She takes the car into town, then remembers at about 10.05 that night that she should have paid the five quid earlier.”
When Nesbitt’s career began to prosper and he started to get a bit of money together, he bought a succession of slightly better cars — including a Vauxhall Nova, then a zippy Fiesta for Sonia. “But the first car I really loved owning was a really old Saab 900,” he says, misting over at the recollection of the ancient motor. “I bought it off Helen Baxendale (his wife in Cold Feet) and it was fabulous, really big and long. It was such an enormous car, you could easily live in it, sleep in it and definitely play snooker in it.”
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Nesbitt and Sonia have two young daughters — Peggy, 6, and Mary, 2, part of the reason he now owns the £60,000 Audi. “I’m not really mad on sports cars,” he says. “We need to have a proper family car, not something silly and totally impractical.”
Then we head off for a quick drive and he enthusiastically points out the car’s other assets: the satellite navigation system, the onboard television, how smoothly the sunroof opens and the seats move back.
“It really is the perfect cross between a sports car and a huge family car,” he says. “It goes from 0 to 62mph in 4.6 seconds, which is obviously very handy for doing school runs around East Dulwich, with all the speed bumps. But doesn’t the engine make a beautiful noise?”
In fact, there is only one car that Nesbitt would consider swapping it for. “I would quite like a Roller,” he says, “but only so I could pull up in it at the golf course in front of my mates.”
ON HIS CD CHANGER
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The Streets — A Grand Don’t Come For Free
Franz Ferdinand — Franz Ferdinand
The Beatles — Rubber Soul
Ash — Free All Angels Avril Lavigne — Let Go. “That is my daughters’ favourite, and Sk8er Boi gets played at least 20 times a day.”