The iconic British TV show Ray Winstone keeps turning down: “I’ve been asked many times”
There aren’t many TV shows I can think of that wouldn’t be vastly improved by the addition of Ray Winstone.
Antiques Roadshow, for instance, would be markedly better if right at the point that some old dear is told her pocket watch heirloom is worth ten grand, Winstone popped up, wielding a snooker ball in a sock and told her, ‘I’m the daddy now’, and scarpered off with it.
Sadly, the truth is that Winstone hasn’t really done a huge number of TV programmes recently, given he’s been acting on our screens as far back as 1979 in the borstal drama Scum, and even those he has done are disappointingly to type: the gritty Antoine Fuqua-directed US diamond-trade drama ICE back in 2016, or Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen on Netflix.
The exception to that is when he lends his voice to animated stuff, which is great, because then you get Ray Winstone being a Womble (“Tell that Uncle Bulgaria he’s a slag”), or occasionally have him in Dickensian period dramas like Great Expectations (“Pip, dear old chap, go and get the fackin’ shooter from the jam jar!”)
Of course, one TV show where you would imagine Winstone would fit right in would be on Albert Square in EastEnders, given he’s a born and bred Londoner, a West Ham obsessive and presumably someone with a superb understanding of cockney slang. But no, he is yet to sup a pint in the Queen Vic, although it isn’t for want of people trying.
He told The Sun, “I’ve been asked many times. I’m very flattered by it, and I’ve got some great friends there. But again, it’s the same scenario as theatre, I don’t want to get locked into something that long, because I may as well go and do a 9-to-5 job in an office somewhere.”
You’re not going to get Winstone working in an office nowadays, not given that he’s 69 years old and times have changed; you can’t just attack people in break rooms for some perceived slight. And it doesn’t sound like you’re going to see Winstone in EastEnders either; the closest he came was apparently in 2008 when he was offered the role of Billy Mitchell’s brother, but turned it down so he could do Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which is a bit like turning something down so that you can spend a week drinking gone-off milk.
Regardless, we’ll still get our fill of Ray because he has plenty coming in the pipeline, including an as yet untitled biopic of 1980s snooker legend Jimmy White, plus a film called Yeti, which at first glance sounds like it might be a clever title for an arthouse movie, perhaps about a French immigrant who must battle their way out of a tough Parisienne upbringing, but of course it’s about an actual yeti, with a father and daughter trying to escape a big snowy monster awoken by an avalanche.
More excitingly, Winstone will be back in season two of The Gentlemen later in the year, with Ritchie’s mobland Netflix hit one of the better bits of British TV in recent years. He plays drug dealer Bobby Glass, but this time he’ll be running an empire from behind bars. It’ll hit the streaming giant in autumn.
