With three new projects shortly to be released, the screen’s favourite hardman gets stuck into politics, family, Sunday lunch and ‘cockney morality’
The actor Ray Winstone, who is best known for his depictions of men muddled in criminality, has a torso so large and legs so thin that seeing him enter the breakfast lounge of a London hotel is like watching a barrel walk in on stilts. Winstone is 67 now. In real life he resembles the characters he has spent a career perpetuating on screen. He maintains the east London accent he developed in childhood. He swears gruffly and nonstop. He chuckles at calling people “fuckers”. It would surprise no one if he were voted film and television’s most specific brand. When, partway through our discussion, I ask if he’s ever troubled by people considering him professionally one-dimensional, he replies, “Not one fucking bit – you typecast yourself.” Then, showing off a bawdy sense of humour that is never far from the surface, he adds, “I’ll play a woman if you want. But you probably wouldn’t like my legs.”
Winstone and I are here to discuss three new projects: The Gentlemen, a Guy Ritchie series, in which he plays the patriarch of a criminal family in peril; Damsel, a Netflix vehicle in which he plays the patriarch of a family grappling with a regrettable decision; and A Bit of Light, an independent film in which he plays the patriarch of a family struggling through anguish. (A Bit of Light is based on a play of the same name by Rebecca Callard, who has described it as “like Mary Poppins with trauma”.) Winstone’s motivations for working haven’t changed since his first significant production, the 1979 film Scum, in which he played a troublesome adolescent battling for social power in a young offenders institute. “You go have fun for six weeks, see how it turns out,” he says, of filming. “If it turns out great, it’s a plus. If it don’t, it don’t. But you’ve had a great six weeks.” After all of that, you pay what you owe. “You do do films you don’t want to do,” he continues. “But you’ve got to do them because you haven’t worked in a little while and you’ve got to pay the rent.”