Headbutts and healing: the truth behind Ray Winstone’s directorial duels
Actors aren’t always reflective of their most famous characters in real life, but Ray Winstone really is a gruff and no-nonsense sort who isn’t willing to take shit from anybody, regardless of who they are or what they’ve accomplished.
The actor was moulded by controversy after Alan Parker’s controversial Scum served as his breakthrough role, and while it took him a good few years after that to become an internationally recognised star, Winstone didn’t go about it by bowing down and kissing the ring. If he was going to do it, he would do it on his terms and nobody else’s.
One potential pitfall of being combative is that it occasionally causes sparks to fly, with Winstone admitting that his short fuse wasn’t always a benefit during his younger days. Age tends to mellow most people, though, with the cockney geezer having softened his edges with the passing of time, not that it’s dampened his signature brand of ferocious charisma and foreboding screen presence in any way.
Things were different when he was an upstart with an axe to grind, with Winstone left so affronted by an unnamed filmmaker’s behaviour that he nutted them squarely in the face. “I remember years ago, I was an extra, just an extra, and instead of asking me to move – he was a big fella – the director just picked me up and moved me,” he recalled to The Guardian. “And I headbutted him.”
Did he regret it in the aftermath? “Well, he deserved it,” was the answer, so no. Another mystery director “was so rude all the time” that at a party, Winstone decided he’d had enough and battered them, too. While he wasn’t willing to name those names, he did cop to being on very bad terms with Guy Ritchie for decades before they kissed, made up, and collaborated on Netflix’s The Gentlemen.
Although “fisticuffs never came about” to showcase his newfound maturity, a disagreement over Winstone’s potential casting in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels put them at loggerheads for more than 20 years. The old Ray would have probably socked him in the jaw, but that sort of behaviour is unbecoming of a man in his position.
It’s not just directors, either, with Winstone calling out Jack Nicholson for his “arrogance” on the set of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. “He’s not the first person I’ve clashed with,” came the curt response. “He won’t be the last.” Respect needs to be a two-way street in his mind, and when the acting legend wasn’t giving it, their relationship quickly froze over.
Winstone’s worldview can be boiled down to, “You either say your piece and tell them to shut the fuck up, or you punch them in the mouth,” poetic words he’s lived his entire professional life by.
