The awful 2015 movie Ray Winstone only made for the money: “It pays the rent, to be honest”
When looking through an actor’s filmography, it’s usually pretty easy to spot which parts they’ve only played for the money, so Ray Winstone really didn’t need to point it out, but he did anyway.
His reasons for boarding Martin Scorsese’s The Departed are self-explanatory, as was the impetus behind collaborating with Darren Aronofsky and Russell Crowe on Noah, while the chance to challenge himself as an actor was the driving force behind his involvement in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth.
At the complete opposite end of the spectrum, Winstone’s participation in forgettable fantasy dreck like Snow White and the Huntsman and Damsel, voice-only gigs in The Queen’s Corgi and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and an uncredited cameo as Ares in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief speak for themselves.
As much as it’s easy to judge the upper echelons of Hollywood for chasing that bag when they’re already worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Winstone isn’t that rich. He’s a million miles away from being on the breadline, but when you can’t command a multi-million-dollar salary every time you appear onscreen, any thespian is well within their rights to ensure that mortgage gets paid every month.
He wasn’t shy about it, either, and for anyone unfortunate enough to waste their time and money on seeing for themselves, it was glaringly obvious what had twisted the star’s arm into stepping into Gary Busey’s demented shoes to play Angelo Pappas in the interminable 2015 remake of Point Break.
Kathryn Bigelow’s 1991 original was one of the best and most iconic action flicks of the decade, with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze generating twice as many sparks as your average rom-com duo. As for the redux? It was a waste of $100 million, and that was reflected in its disastrous box office showing.
Inheriting a character from such a singular presence, for want of a better word, as Busey would usually require a performance of some energy. Instead, Winstone doesn’t bring anything remotely memorable to Point Break V2.0, and when he was asked what convinced him to sign on, he was at least frank.
“It pays the rent, to be honest with you,” he acknowledged. Not only did it stuff a few pennies in his pocket, but what actor in their right mind would turn down the chance to run around and deliver increasingly frantic exposition in a string of glamorous locations dotted across the globe?
“You’ve been travelling to places like, well, I’ve been in Berlin, all over Europe, Brindisi, Italy, which I love, you know,” Winstone explained. “And I’ve been to Tahiti, and I’m going to Venezuela in a couple of weeks to finish it off, and you know, I’ve had enough now, I’ve done it now, you know. It’s such a tough life, I’ve got to tell you.” Getting paid to jet around the world for a vapid genre film? The heart bleeds for him.
