“She could have said astronaut and I would have given it a shot,” he admitted.
During his career, which saw him nominated for an Oscar last year for his role in Living, Nighy has performed two Shakespeare plays professionally.
The first was The Taming Of The Shrew at the Gateway Theatre in Chester, and the second was King Lear with Sir Anthony Hopkins at the National Theatre in London.
He told BBC Radio 4: “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.”