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Ray Winstone interview: 'I don't want to go partying with Brad Pitt'
Ray Winstone is his usual terrifying self battling Russell Crowe in Noah, and even his own wife finds him a touch unapproachable. But that’s just how he likes it
I can hear Ray Winstone some time before I see him. He’s being asked if he’d like a cup of tea to take into our interview. “Yeah,” he says, or rather “Yurr” – the Cockney r’s come rolling down the corridor.
And what sort of tea would he like? “Builders,” he says. “Lovely.”
He makes quite an impression when he appears too. He’s wearing a three-piece suit and an electric blue shirt with a very swirly pattern. “Bit loud, isn’t it?” he says proudly. He’s also wearing dark glasses – but only, he explains, because he’s left his normal reading glasses at home and he can’t read otherwise.
Even so, it adds to Winstone’s general air of menace, to the sense of him being someone whose fuse is as short as it is smouldering. It’s not hard to see why director Darren Aronofsky’s thoughts turned eastwards when he was looking for someone to play the baddy in his Biblical film, Noah – specifically to a large house in rural Essex with its own in-house bar called Raymondo’s.
That’s where Winstone was two years ago when the phone rang. “I was sitting at home when I got a call from an agent about the film. I can’t say I knew that much about Noah – I mean I knew about the animals going into the Ark two by two, but that was about it. The first thing I asked was who’s going to be playing Noah because I knew it wouldn’t be me – obviously.”
He was told that Noah would be played by Russell Crowe. “And that’s when I started to laugh. Then I asked who I’d be playing and they told me I would be Tubal-cain, a descendant of the original Cain. And I started laughing again. Then I asked who the director was and they said Darren Aronofsky. That’s when I stopped laughing. I know Mickey Rourke pretty well and I remembered how he couldn’t speak highly enough of Darren when they did The Wrestler together. I’d really liked Black Swan too, so I knew it was going to be a serious piece of work.”
A script duly arrived in the post and a few days later Aronofsky called and asked what he thought of it. “I said, er, it’s terrible, Darren – because it was, really bad. However, it turned out I’d been sent a script that was two years out of date. So they sent me the latest one and it was… blinding.”
Russell Crowe and Ray Winstone in Noah
Several weeks later Winstone left Essex and caught a plane to New York. Flying over Long Island, he looked out of the window and saw an enormous ship on the ground below. This turned out to be the Ark.
“I knew it was going to be an epic, but this was amazing. And inside the Ark it was full of all these prosthetic animals that moved and seemed to breathe – snakes and spiders and what have you. The place even smelled like a stable.”
Aronofsky had warned Winstone beforehand that it was going to be a tough shoot – lots of fighting and lifting, not to mention some very heavy rainfall. “What he actually said was, ‘I’m going to kill you, man.’ At first I went, yeah, yeah, yeah…’ Then I thought, hold on, I’m 57 years of age and I’m not in the fittest condition of my life. But I’ve got this thing where I like a bit of pain. I like getting up in the morning feeling bruised and battered. Just as well as it turns out. I’d never met Russell before, but we got on fine, even when we were bashing the granny out of each other – which we did plenty of.”
By the time Winstone had finished the movie he had a trapped nerve in his neck and he couldn’t move one arm because of all the hammers and cudgels he’d been lifting. “But I felt like I’d been to work, you know. I felt pretty pleased with myself.”
In the film Winstone has a line which goes “I give life and I take it away” – it turns out that he wrote it himself. Behind his bearish exterior he’s a wonderfully subtle actor – as anyone who saw him going almost mad with grief after the death of his son in Tony Grounds’s BBC drama Our Boy will recall. But over the course of his career he’s done an awful lot more taking away of life than giving it.
Partly this is down to the way he looks, and partly to the fact that he seems able to unleash his inner beast so easily – remember him pummelling a fellow inmate half to death with a billiard-ball-filled sock in Scum. I wondered what it was like going through life with aggression bubbling so close to the surface.
“Ah…” he says. “Actually, I’ve thought about this quite a lot and think it’s a bit like going to see a psychiatrist. When I was a young man I was a raving lunatic – fiery, mouthy, you name it. But I think that having that… that access to menace, if you like, has served me very well. It’s made me aware of what I’m capable of physically, and it’s also educated me not to behave like that.”
'I was a lunatic': Ray Winstone in Scum (Rex)
However much he may have changed over the years, Winstone still puts the wind up people, he concedes. “My wife said to me once, ‘What’s the matter with you? When you walk into a room, you look as if you’re going to kill somebody.’ I told her, ‘Well, everyone is talking to each other – no one seems to talk to me.’ She said, ‘That’s because you’re unapproachable.’
“I suppose that must be how I come over. But I’m not unapproachable!” he says. “At least I hope I’m not. I may give the impression of not caring what anyone thinks of me, but that’s not the case either. I don’t want people to dislike me and I don’t want to upset people. Maybe it’s a bit of a defence mechanism, you know – the unapproachability.
“Mind you,” he adds. “If somebody p----- me off… I mean, if I’ve done everything I can to accommodate someone and they’re still not buying it, well…”
Well what? “Well, f--- ‘em,” he says quietly.
Far from being the gregarious roaring boy of popular repute, Winstone turns out to have always been a bit of a loner. Growing up in Enfield, where his father ran a fruit and veg business, he was never part of a gang when he was young.
“Nah, I had one or two friends – that was all. My oldest friend is someone I’ve known since we were seven. I’ve got a few mates who are actors, but most of them come from where I grew up. I feel comfortable with them, whereas in the film industry – this sounds a little bit unkind, but a lot of actors always seem to be running away from something. Or else they’re trying to be something they’re not. I find I’ve got very little in common with people like that. I mean, I don’t want to sit down after a day’s work and talk about did I see King Lear the other night! I like talking about other things – football, boxing, travelling. Things like that.”
The young Winstone was a keen boxer – three times London schoolboy champion, he also boxed twice for England. What he relished most of all, he says, was not the actual biffing and bashing, but the mental challenge involved. “It’s like a chess match, you know. Pitting your wits against someone else – I loved it. And I think it taught me more about morality and respect than anything else.”
It also proved very useful when he went to drama school. He’d never intended to become an actor – that was all his parents’ idea. They saw him in a school play and thought he looked as if belonged on stage.
“I’d only done the play because I fancied a girl who was in it. As far as I was concerned being an actor was a complete fantasy world to me. I never believed for a moment that I’d be in a film – that was something that happened to other people. But because of the boxing, I found I was never scared when I walked on stage. The worst that could happen to you was that you might be booed, but if you went into a boxing ring and made a fool of yourself, you ended up getting hurt.”
After a year he was kicked out of drama school – for putting tacks under the headmaster’s car tyres. Yet what on the surface looks like a prime example of raving lunacy turns out to have been rather more complicated than that. The reason he did it, Winstone explains, was because he hadn’t been invited to the headmaster’s Christmas party. In other words, he was sore because he’d been excluded – and that feeling of being on the outside looking in has never entirely gone away.
“If I’m really honest, I’ve had a hang-up for years about not feeling part of this profession – because of my background. It’s inverted snobbery, I suppose. Certainly, I used to feel that a lot. Now, though, I tend to think, oh f--- it – I’m doing all right, so I must be accepted in a certain way. But in the past… I don’t know, I just didn’t feel that I belonged.”
While the idea of appearing in a movie may have been a complete fantasy, Winstone landed the lead role in the film of Scum when he was just 20. But although this put him on the map, he didn’t look as if he was going to stay there long. By the time he was in his late twenties, he’d been declared bankrupt twice.
“I never paid tax – that was the problem. It got to the point where there was no more light at the end of the tunnel. The second time I was made bankrupt, I made a decision that I was going to work as hard as I could to get out of this mess. I just wanted to be able to open the front door without worrying who might be there.
“But in a way it did me a favour because I realised I had to be professional about being an actor, instead of just winging it the whole time. That’s when I realised that I had something, that I was different. Not everyone may like what I do, but I found my own way of doing things. I didn’t copy anyone.”
Slowly he got himself back on track. He got married and went on to have three daughters – the oldest of whom, Lois and Jaime, are now both actresses. Perhaps most importantly as far as his career was concerned, he learnt to trust his own instincts.
“I’m not an intellectual. A lot of people in my game are – or pretend they are, but I’m not. And I’ve never been an ambitious person, or set targets in my life. But I do think I’m pretty good at choosing stuff. When I’m reading a script, if it doesn’t make me laugh or cry, or if I don’t get something from it emotionally, then I’ll just put it down. And that’s served me pretty well. Films like Nil by Mouth, War Zone and Sexy Beast – I knew right away that they were brilliant for me.”
'I like going on holiday': Ray Winstone in Sexy Beast (Rex)
He’s also succeeded in living the sort of life he wants to lead. “I’ve never wanted to be an A-lister, or go to parties with Brad Pitt, or live in the Caribbean, or any of that. Nor do I intend to carry on forever. I see actors who are very wealthy and who never stop working and I think, why do you do it? I suppose it’s because they either like it, or because they need to be somebody. But I’ve never felt the need to be somebody. I don’t need to be floating about in a Learjet – although that’s very nice – or be on a red carpet every two minutes. That’s just not me. I want to go home and see me kids and go on holiday. In fact, I probably like going on holiday more than anything else.”
Does he get bored easily?
“Yeah, totally,” he says. “I get bored very easily.”
What about booze? Is he a big drinker? “Once a week. I used to do it a lot more but it was starting to bore me, funnily enough. Also I can go three or four months without a drink because I just don’t fancy it. That does me good because I’m a bit of a binger. When I do hit it… well, it takes a while for me to get over it, put it that way.”
I’ve often heard Winstone say in interviews that he’s just the guy next door – except he isn’t. At least the guy next door to where I live doesn’t spend weeks rolling around on the floor with Russell Crowe.
“Well, perhaps that was kind of a wrong statement. Perhaps it’s the fact that I would like to be the guy next door, and I try to live my life like the guy next door. I mean, I go down the pub, do the shopping, stuff like that.”
Quite a lot of the time, though, he sits at home throwing things at the television. “That’s how my anger tends to come out nowadays. But that’s just what you do when you’re over 40, isn’t it? It’s just Old Man Syndrome.”
One day, if there’s any justice, Winstone will win an Oscar. Then he might just find himself bopping about with Brad Pitt after all. But in the meantime the work keeps rolling in – and however much he likes staying at home, some offers are impossible to refuse.
“Although I loved doing Noah, I got really homesick. When I was 28 or 29 I’d go out drinking or whatever after a day’s shooting, but not anymore. I mean, we had our moments on this. Russell had a beer with us a few times – he’s very social, Russell. But on the whole I’d go back to my apartment after a day being thrown off the Ark and I’d think what I’d really like is a massage or a sauna. Most of the time, though, I didn’t even manage to do that. Most of the time I just lay on the couch and fell fast asleep.”
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