Ray Winstone’s dream role depends entirely on one director: “That’s the kind of guy I am”
Interviewing Ray Winstone is a real throwback experience, and a genuine pleasure. As an interviewee, they don’t come any more generous. He will sit down with you, ask how you are doing and despite the presence of surrounding PR people and agents, will simply tell you to “Ask me anything you like!”
Despite the fact he has worked with some of the true greats of the industry including the likes of Martin Scorsese, Ben Kingsley and Steven Spielberg, Winstone has absolutely no airs or graces. He hasn’t let fame get to him whatsoever. Speaking to him is like standing next to a bloke at the bar in a pub while the football is on – only the bloke happens to have held his own in acting with the very best of Hollywood for three decades.
Many will have seen Winstone in his astonishing breakthrough role, as the young tearaway Carlin in Alan Clarke’s vicious late ‘70s drama Scum. Or acting alongside that film’s Phil Daniels for a second time two years later in the Who-penned rock drama Quadrophenia.
Others may know him from his BAFTA-award-winning role in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, in which he is a genuinely terrifying figure, a horrible, angry menace. It is a performance you won’t forget once you’ve seen it, and it led to another iconic part in Sexy Beast, the 2000 heist movie for which Winstone travelled to Spain in order to get as deep a tan as possible and eat as much as he could.
Former boxer Winstone grew up in the East End of London, his home visited by the likes of notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, so heading to theatre school was not the norm. But in tandem with being taken to the cinema on a weekly basis by his father, the young man caught the acting bug and started to pick up small roles on TV series, including The Sweeney.
After Scum came a decade of TV work and the occasional film before Nil by Mouth and the successful transition to Hollywood, where he was cast alongside Nicole Kidman and Jude Law in the period war drama Cold Mountain in 2003, he then picked up an Emmy for his work as a private investigator in TV crime drama Vincent, before Scorsese came calling and cast him as a violent enforcer in 2006’s Boston mob drama The Departed.
Over the past ten years Winstone has continued to work in major movies and TV shows, most recently teaming up with Guy Ritchie for the Netflix series The Gentlemen – a relationship that took some work to fix after the pair fell out when Winstone didn’t take up a role on the director’s smash hit gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
They’ve made up now though, although if it came down to playing Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’ in a film helmed by Ritchie or his Nil by Mouth director Gary Oldman it would be a close run thing. Winstone told the Independent: “With Guy, who’s brilliant at what he does, he heightens everything. He’d give it pace. Someone like Gary would be much more into the reality side of things. It depends what alley you want to go down. I think, for my style, I’d probably go with Gary.”
“But then, If it was only offered by Guy, I’d go with Guy,” he explained. “Because that’s the kind of guy I am!”
Winstone will next be seen in a film about Samuel Beckett named Burnt Piano, and a biopic about the flamboyant snooker star Jimmy White.
