The career slump that almost made Ray Winstone quit acting: “I’ve done some crap”
An impeccable filmography is probably the hardest thing for any actor to attain, but Ray Winstone clearly lent his name to one too many misfires in quick succession if he was prepared to ride off into the sunset before things got any worse.
Having been constantly working since 1979, things must have been in serious danger of going completely off the rails. Any performer who spends four decades plying their trade is guaranteed to appear in a handful of duds, but there’s always the potential to stumble upon greatness.
Winstone has Scum, Quadrophenia, Nil by Mouth, Sexy Beast, Cold Mountain, The Proposition, The Departed, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Rango, and Noah in his filmography, which were either box office hits, critical darlings, awards season favourites, or a combination of all three.
The good tends to outweigh the bad because an actor knows that even if they drop the ball a couple of times, something better lurks around the corner more often than not. Winstone was already a veteran by the time he was dragged into a pit of existential despair, which indicates that he became too self-aware for his own liking that his ability to sniff out a decent project had almost completely deserted him.
“For a while, I felt, ‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m getting worse. The scripts are getting worse. Let’s turn it in. Let’s retire and die gracefully,'” he told iPaper. “I’ve done some crap. I regret some. But you have to go to work and pay the bills.” While he didn’t single out any movies specifically, it’s not too much of a stretch to do the maths and figure out exactly which barren stretch he’s talking about.
Winstone confirmed he was contemplating retirement in 2018, right before he co-starred with Michael Caine in the true-life heist caper King of Thieves. After voicing a villain in 2011’s Oscar-winning animated feature Rango and reuniting with Martin Scorsese on Hugo, the next few years of his career didn’t make for encouraging reading.
He phoned it in as a dwarf in Razzie-nominated fantasy Snow White and the Huntsman, the remake of The Sweeney was forgotten about as soon as the credits rolled, crime thriller Ashes never saw the inside of a cinema, Sean Penn’s vanity project The Gunman was an egregious waste of a talented ensemble, the Point Break remake was another widely panned flop, and political thriller Zipper was effectively swept under the rug.
Hardly a stellar run of form, and several of them being glorified paycheque gigs does suggest that it might have been the wilderness years Winstone was referring to. Obviously, he didn’t ditch his day job to live a peaceful life, but neither has he continued choosing parts he isn’t going to end up regretting, which is acting in a nutshell.
