The double-edged sword of Ray Winstone’s most jaw-dropping role
For the most part, casting directors have a very specific role or type of character in mind when they approach Ray Winstone to gauge his interest in signing up for a production.
Things can change, of course, with Martin Scorsese completely rewriting the part of Mr French in The Departed once Winstone came aboard, but the enduring favourite of British and Hollywood cinema alike has largely built his career on the back of specific characteristics.
Ever since his breakthrough role in Alan Parker’s heated and highly controversial film Scum, ferocity was key to Winstone’s ascension. Even when he’s not doing anything, he gives off the impression of a guy who can explode at any moment, and that innate anger has served him very well playing a number of crooks, criminals, violent thugs, and grizzled figures.
No offence intended to Winstone, but action hero vibes are something he’s never exuded in either body, mind, or spirit. With that in mind, when he was tasked to play the lead in a fantasy epic carrying a hefty price tag of $150million, he was understandably bemused by the prospect at first.
At five feet and ten inches, he’s by no means a short man, but his barrel-chested physicality doesn’t tend to lend itself too well to stunts, brawls, and the industry’s idealised version of what a big-budget protagonist should look like. Fortunately, he didn’t end up looking like himself at all to do the job.
Robert Zemeckis decided that Winstone was the perfect person to embody Beowulf in his lavish adaptation of the epic poem, despite the obvious differences between the stout cockney and the godlike figure with washboard abs and a pair of pecs capable of cracking walnuts in between them with a mere flex.
Obvious casting it was not, but for Winstone, it was a transformative filmmaking experience in more ways than one. “I thought it was fantastic,” he admitted to Pop Entertainment. “I didn’t have to train, I didn’t even have to eat the right foods, I didn’t have to go running. I just ate cheese.” Not the usual preparations, then, but when he saw the character for the first time, his “jaw hit the floor”.
Not for the last time, either, with Winstone fascinated by the experimental nature of a picture that cast him opposite the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, Robin Wright, Brendan Gleeson, Crispin Glover, and John Malkovich. “You are performing with the greatest actors in the world,” he marvelled. “And performing you are.”
Parading around in a motion capture leotard “makes your imagination explode” as an actor according to Winstone, who once again was left with mouth agape when he saw the finished product. “I sat down in the cinema with my brother-in-law and my jaw hit the floor,” he said. “I mean, I’m working with Robert Zemeckis and he’s a genius, but even I don’t think he meant for it to look like that.”
The downside is that he was pushing 50 at the time, making it “the most physical job” of his professional life, but one major positive was that “it was the purest performance you can have” as an actor when there were was so much of every scene left entirely to the imagination of the people playing them out.
There were some major negatives, however, not least of all, Beowulf underperformed at the box office and ultimately lost money. Zemeckis also failed to overcome the dead-eyed detours into the uncanny valley that plagued The Polar Express, while his ongoing experiments in the world of performance-captured cinema ultimately ended in disaster.
Following several more flops, his ImageMovers Digital company was ultimately shuttered, resulting in the loss of 450 jobs, with the announcement of those mass layoffs coming a little over two years after Beowulf hit cinemas in November 2007. For Winstone, it was the most jaw-dropping performance he’d ever been allowed to give, but the long-term ramifications were dire for so many of the people who’d worked so hard to make it happen.
