‘The Gunman’: The embarrassing vanity project that paired Ray Winstone with “one of the best screen actors in the world”
There’s a perilously thin line between a passion project and a vanity project, and while Ray Winstone ended up being roped into a movie that fell firmly into the latter camp, he didn’t care in the slightest because he got to work with an actor he held in the highest regard.
Over the course of a career that’s fast closing in on its 50th anniversary, Winstone has been able to rub shoulders with some of the finest talents Hollywood has to offer on either side of the camera, and he’s shown he can more than hold his own against them.
Like many actors, he’s been in some right old shite, too, but even when he was found slumming it in dreck like Tom Hooper’s infamous disaster Cats, interminable fantasy Snow White and the Huntsman, forgettable crime thriller London Boulevard, and lifeless sequel Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, there were plenty of top-notch names on display.
Those four misfires alone counted Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Charlize Theron, Bob Hoskins, Colin Farrell, Keira Knightley, Uma Thurman, and Pierce Brosnan among their ensemble, so even when Winstone is missing the mark by a country mile, he still finds himself in the orbit of stars and legends alike.
Of course, his biggest and best movies have seen him collaborating with Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Ben Kingsley, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Gary Oldman, so it’s evened itself out in the long run. Fortunately, working with a star he called “one of the best screen actors in the world” must have softened the crushing retrospective blow of getting involved in Sean Penn’s laughable The Gunman.
As Winstone explained to Square Mile, the chance to shoot scenes with the two-time Academy Award winner was “one of the reasons I wanted to work with him.” For Penn, apparently, the film seemed to exist solely to stroke his ego and try to establish him as the latest leading man to try and weaponize their midlife crisis into box office success.
Presumably jealous watching Liam Neeson enjoy a resurgence as a man of action, Penn went right to the source by drafting in Taken director Pierre Morel to helm The Gunman, which the star also co-wrote. Playing a retired assassin drawn back into the game and featuring the obligatory shirtless scenes to show off his ripped physique, it was action cinema painted by numbers.
Alongside Penn and Winstone, the stacked roster also included Idris Elba alongside Oscar winners Javier Bardem and Mark Rylance. However, The Gunman failed miserably in cinemas after recouping a little over half of its $40 million budget in ticket sales. Critics and audiences dragged it around the back and sent it the way of Old Yeller.
Winstone did at least manage to check Penn off his wish-list of actors he was desperate to share the screen with, which by extension made him one of the very few people to benefit from The Gunman‘s existence.
