Actor Bill Nighy talks to Salon's Melanie McFarland about picking up where David Bowie left off in "The Man Who Fell to Earth" story. The Showtime series, in which Nighy stars, expands on Walter Tevis' 1963 novel and the 1976 film in which Bowie stars as an alien who comes to earth to innovate game-changing technological wonders. For Nighy, it was important to make the role his own. "It has to be me playing Thomas Jerome Newton," he said. "I'm not David Bowie. I'm never going to be David Bowie, and to try and sort of nearly impersonate David Bowie doesn't seem to me to be a legitimate enterprise and would devalue the whole project." Nighy also shares the types of characters he likes playing.