Veteran actor Ray Winstone has opened up about his brief stint in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it doesn’t sound especially positive. Winstone, who played villain Dreykov in 2021 Scarlett Johansson vehicle Black Widow, gave an interview to Radio Times this week where he expressed frustrations with producers on the pandemic-released film, who apparently ordered him back to do reshoots because he was, essentially, acting too hard for the movie.
“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” the Sexy Beast star notes. “Then you find out that a few producers have come down, and your performance is too much, it’s too strong… That’s the way Marvel works.” Despite our fervent hopes, Winstone doesn’t go into specifics about what he was doing that was “too strong,” but does ruefully note that, “It can be soul-destroying because you feel like you’re doing great work.” He goes to far as to say he tried to figure out how he could get out of his contract, saying, “I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it because that was it for me.’ And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise you end up in court. It’s like being kicked in the balls.”
It’s worth noting that, even in the version of the movie that made its way to streaming, Dreykov makes a decent run at being one of the nastiest villains in the entire MCU, a mind-controlling manipulator who clearly takes pleasure in the control he has over his young female “students” in the sinister Red Room. Which is, presumably, why you hire a guy like Ray Winstone to play him: These kind of villainous roles are where Marvel frequently gets to actually cut loose with its performances—but not, apparently, too much.