A most peculiar way

Why Bill Nighy has taken on David Bowie's defining screen role in a television sequel to cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

Bill Nighy: "David Bowie was kind of my guy growing up."

He has been a squid-faced ghost pirate, a zombie and a vampire or two. But Bill Nighy has never been an alien. He has fixed that now in the television series The Man Who Fell to Earth. He's not just any alien, either - he's Thomas Jerome Newton, the character David Bowie made his own in the 1976 Nicolas Roeg movie of the same name, adapted from Walter Tevis' 1963 novel.

And Nighy's not just another Newton. Effectively, the 72-year-old is Bowie's Newton 45 years later, still earthbound, still blind from his cruel treatment by the authorities, still hitting the bottle, and still, well, off the planet.

But this time he's not really the man of the title. That's Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays Faraday, another alien from Newton's dying planet, Anthea. He has been seemingly summoned to Earth by his senior extraterrestrial and has to learn to appear human just as Bowie's starman did.

The series riffs on its Bowie ancestry in other ways - the 10 episodes are named after his songs, beginning with Hallo Spaceboy and ending with The Man Who Sold the World. Having made the choice to retain the Newton-Bowie character in the update, showrunner Alex Kurtzman says getting the casting right was a challenge.

"It was a double-edged sword because, on the one hand, the biggest mistake we could probably make would be to try to invoke or evoke David Bowie in any way. Because he was so singular that all we could do would be to fail, right?