The unlikely role that convinced Steven Spielberg he needed to work with Ray Winstone
When Steven Spielberg was casting a long-awaited sequel to his most beloved franchise, he knew exactly who he wanted to play British secret agent George ‘Mac’ McHale. After all, a few years earlier he’d seen iconic London hardman Ray Winstone in a low-budget indie that blew him away. However, that particular movie didn’t involve Winstone doing anything most people would associate with a globetrotting spy and war hero. Instead, it mostly saw him sunning himself in a pair of speedos.
In the early 2000s, Winstone began to make serious headway in Hollywood after spending much of his career up to that point working in British cinema. Between 2003 and 2007, he starred in eye-catching supporting turns in Cold Mountain, King Arthur, and The Departed before finally landing his first lead role in a large-scale blockbuster. That film was Robert Zemeckis’ animated version of Beowulf, which saw Winstone don a motion capture suit for the first time to play the titular warrior.
Amusingly, though, none of these movies was the one Spielberg loved so much. When it came time to cast Winstone in 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the iconic director was actually thinking about a 2000 gangster classic that developed a significant cult following in the years after its release: Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast.
“If I remember rightly, it was in his top four,” Winstone told NME in 2020. “He loved it. It’s probably the reason that I was in the Indiana Jones movie – because he liked Sexy Beast so much.” Indeed, Winstone was correct. In the official Lucasfilm production materials for Crystal Skull, Spielberg revealed that Sexy Beast made him realise the gruff Englishman was “one of the most brilliant actors around.”
Winstone has always loved Sexy Beast, so he loved hearing such high praise from a luminary like Spielberg. He said, “For him to give the film the thumbs-up like that was quite a compliment. We can pussyfoot about and look at critics’ reviews and all that kind of stuff, but when someone in your industry who you hold to really high esteem comes out and comments like that, I think it means a lot.”
In truth, Glazer’s film was a showcase for an actor like Winstone because it took a skewed tack on the London gangster genre, which was so popular at the time, thanks to Guy Ritchie. Instead of serving up more of the same, Sexy Beast was set in the bright, sunny Costa del Sol and incorporated elements of magical realism into its story of a retired gangster dragged back into the underworld for one last job.
Winstone was able to show different colours to his usual tough guy repertoire, as his character Gary ‘Gal’ Dove is regretful, afraid, and pining for his wife for much of the film. In fact, it was his choice to portray Gal instead of the film’s hair-trigger villain Don Logan, precisely because he wanted to stretch himself as an actor. He admitted, “I’d kind of played those characters like Don before, you know. When I read it, I kind of loved Gary, and I fancied playing Gary. I fancied I could do something with that.”
Ultimately, Winstone’s suntanned, tortured gangster put him in the frame for Crystal Skull, and he jumped at the chance to make a film his children could watch. Amusingly, though, at 50 years old, he wasn’t fully prepared for the physical elements the role would require of him.
He told GMTV, “As I’m getting older, I seem to be running about more. I tore a hamstring while I was doing this one. We were running down these steps. I keep getting these action parts as I’m getting older, but I want romantic parts. I want to kiss.”
