Bill Nighy has said starring in upcoming film Joy was “one of the nicest jobs I’ve had”.

The film tells the true story of the world’s first IVF baby, Louise Joy Brown, and will be released in the UK on November 15 following its premiere at the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) today.

In it Nighy plays scientist Patrick Steptoe, who created the technology, which is used to treat infertility, alongside nurse Jean Purdy and physiologist Sir Robert Edwards.

Speaking about his role in the film at LFF, the 74-year-old told the PA news agency: “It was one of the nicest jobs I’ve ever had, and that’s not PR, everyone on it was committed, everybody knew why they were there.

“The producer has an IVF family, the director has an IVF family, and the writer has IVF children, so there was that element which informed the atmosphere to some degree.

The cast of Joy and Louise Joy Brown at a film premiere
The cast of Joy and Louise Joy Brown at the film’s London premiere (Ian West/PA)

“And it’s a great story, these people failed over and over and over again for a 10-year period, against enormous opposition from the church, from the newspapers, from their families, from the medical association.

“Nobody believed in them, people put scare stories around that the children would be born with abnormalities, that they’d be deformed, that there would be mutations, all of that kind of tabloid stuff, and they persevered.

“And now it is estimated there are 16 million women who have children who would not have had children had they not persevered, so you can’t get much of a bigger story than that.

“And the fact that Jean Purdy, the female scientist, was airbrushed out of the whole affair because she didn’t have a penis was something we’re familiar with now in the story of DNA.

“One of the millions of occasions where women have been dismissed as part of the story, because they were considered sub-humans.”

Brown, 46, was also present at the premiere and said it was “surreal but amazing” that the film about her life was giving the creators of IVF the “recognition that they deserve”.

She told PA: “It’s very surreal but amazing that the three pioneers (of IVF) are finally getting the recognition that they deserve.

“It wasn’t easy for them, but they kept at it and thank you that they did because without them, me and 12 million others wouldn’t be here.”