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 âfuckersâ. It would surprise no one if he were voted film and televisionâs most specific brand. When, partway through our discussion, I ask if heâs ever troubled by people considering him professionally one-dimensional, he replies, âNot one fucking bit â you typecast yourself.â Then, showing off a bawdy sense of humour that is never far from the surface, he adds, âIâll play a woman if you want. But you probably wouldnât like my legs.â
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 âlike Mary Poppins with traumaâ.) Winstoneâs motivations for working havenât 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. âYou go have fun for six weeks, see how it turns out,â he says, of filming. âIf it turns out great, itâs a plus. If it donât, it donât. But youâve had a great six weeks.â After all of that, you pay what you owe. âYou do do films you donât want to do,â he continues. âBut youâve got to do them because you havenât worked in a little while and youâve got to pay the rent.â
Callard has said that, in A Bit of Light, Winstone gives the kind of performance audiences havenât seen from him before â something more vulnerable, less of a caricature. This seems reductive of his talent. Winstone thinks of both Sexy Beast and Nil by Mouth, two of his best-received films, as complicated love stories, and even his gangsters have been knotty and idiosyncratic. âMost really good dramas is family,â he says. âWeâre all fascinated by family units. Whether theyâre solid, whether theyâre dysfunctional, whatever.â In Winstoneâs thinking, the family drama is what heâs been acting all along; A Bit of Light, in which his character deals with the loss of his wife and, in a different way, the loss of his daughter, is to him a natural extension of the career that has come before. âYouâve lost something and you canât have it back,â he says. âThe guilt of thatâ¦â
In each of Winstoneâs upcoming projects his role involves a turbulent father-daughter relationship. In real life, Winstone has three adult daughters, all of whom are actors, all of whom he gets on with, all of whom seem to have tested him in some way. (His eldest, Lois, recently moved with her boyfriend back to the family home in Essex, where Ellie, his youngest, still lives. Jaime, the middle child, lives âTen minutes down the road.â) When I ask if, while filming, he channelled his own father-daughter relationships, he replies, âI guess so, at times,â before adding, âLittle fuckers.â
Winstone delivers this line with an affectionate cackle. He is the sort of playful company in which you feel comfortable laughing along with someone describing his family this way.
I ask, âRay, in what way are they little fuckers?â âListen,â he says. âIâve got three daughters. Have you got three daughters?â
I tell him I have just one. âHow old?â he says. âThree,â I say. âWell, youâll get there,â he says, smiling. âYouâll understand.â
Winstone and his wife, Elaine, to whom heâs been married for 44 years, invite their daughters to lunch every Sunday. Most weeks they come, but Winstone cannot convince them every time. âI spoke to my youngest the other day,â he says, of Ellie, who is 22. âI said to her, âYou coming around on Sunday?â She said no. I said, âBut weâre doing Sunday dinner.â And she said, âDad, I donât fucking want Sunday dinner every fucking Sunday.ââ
Winstone laughs when he tells this story. (âAll right, all right, all right,â he said to her, in the familiar tone of parent placating child.) But still he persists with the invitations. Sunday lunch forms part of his world view: it is a piece of his heritage he does not want to let slip, like his accent and his commitment to a kind of moral code (be courteous, commit to hard work, protect your loved ones â what he describes as a âcockney moralityâ) that he was taught as a child.
Winstone was born in Hackney in 1957. He comes from a family of âpoor people who sometimes fell on hard timesâ, he writes in his memoir, Young Winstone. His father, also Ray, was a greengrocer and, later, a black-cab driver, âworking out of the airport with all his matesâ. When his mother wasnât helping her husband on the markets, she collected cash from one-armed bandit machines. âMy dad was a grafter,â Winstone recalls. âBut my mum was shrewd.â Once, she taught Winstone to tip lemonade on to a fruit machine at a particular moment, at which point the machineâs wires would fry and it would pay out its entire quarry.
Winstone recalls his childhood fondly, though it was not without anger and violence. In his memoir, he recalls being expelled from nursery for fighting, though âit was only a skirmish,â he writes. Winstone describes his young self as âa little fucker,â and laughs. âI wasnât horrible, I donât think, and I was never a thief.â He considers himself a product of his environment. His father, who had once been a boxer, was also once charged with GBH, and sometimes fought with other men in front of his son. âIâve done things Iâm not proud of,â Winstone continues, without elaborating. âItâs all part of the makeup of who you are.â Heâs unsure of the route his life might have taken had he not become an actor. âI like to think I would have been all right,â he says. âBut who knows?â
In his memoir, Winstone writes about violence almost affectionately. When I ask what effect watching his father become threatening might have had on his younger self, he does not dismiss it as shocking. In Young Winstone he writes that, though he will not condone violence, he can âunderstand itâ. Of his father, he adds now, âIt is what it is. Clump or be clumped. He knew that world. Him and his mates, there was a code they lived by. It wasnât a bad code. No one got killed.â
Winstoneâs mother died at 52, when he was 28. His father died six years ago. Of Ray senior, Winstone says, âItâs funny, how you grow up and lose your dad. Before that, heâs the guvânor, heâs in charge â you always think that way. When you lose them, itâs a weight off your shoulders, which I mean in the nicest possible way. Suddenly itâs down to you. You havenât got to worry about upsetting them.â
As an adolescent, Winstone joined the Repton Boxing Club, in east London. âI think what boxing done for me is give me an education,â he says. He had struggled at school. At Repton he learned discipline and, he says, respect. âThe men that run boxing clubs, the way they nurture kids, the way they put kids on a levelâ¦â Winstone twice boxed for England. âIt stood me in good stead,â he said, referring to how boxing prepared him for acting. âWhen youâre scared, you donât say it. You put a face on, you put your chest out, you walk forward and stare them in the eyes.â
While at Repton, Winstone enrolled at the Corona drama school. His parents paid the fees. âThey saw me in the school play,â he says, âand thought it would keep me off the streets.â Winstone was expelled after a year and before that he had been segregated from other students, âbecause of the way I spoke â you know, the elocution.â When I ask if he was a bad influence, he replies, âin a wayâ, and half-smiles. During one early job, as an extra on the ITV sitcom Get Some In!, he head-butted a director for âpicking me upâ instead of âjust asking me to move alongâ. He was barred from working for a time and his tutors all but gave up. Still, he remembers drama school fondly. Of his fellow students he recalls, âNone of them came from where Iâm from and that was a great thing for me.â
On the day Winstone was due to leave the Corona, he agreed to meet some friends for a drink. Several of them were visiting the BBC to audition for an upcoming Alan Clarke production, which was to be set in a borstal, and Winstone tagged along. There, he began chatting up a receptionist, who encouraged him to meet Clarke. He did so, begrudgingly. âI was the last one in,â Winstone recalls, âand we just had a laugh.â When he left, Clarke watched Winstone, whoâd acquired a boxerâs physique and bravado, walk back down the corridor, and offered him the role of Carlin in Scum. He considers the moment life-changing.
At the beginning of his acting career, Winstone often felt out of place on film sets. Even now he often remains uncomfortable. âIâm not a luvvie,â he says, and chuckles. âI donât speak like an actor.â Sometimes heâll be eating dinner with colleagues and all they want to talk about is work, but âI wanna talk about something else. Whoâs boxing tonight? Is there any football on?â Most of his close friends are people outside the industry who heâs known for years. âI donât want to sit around talking endlessly about acting. I go home at night and my wife will be there and she will not ask about acting.â
I say, âWhat do you talk about?â
âUs!â he says. âHow her dayâs been. What sheâs been up to. Sheâs got a good radar. Whenever Iâve had to kiss someone on set, she knows. I must give it away when I come in. Thereâs something witchy about her.â He pauses⦠âOr sheâs got a tag on me.â
Halfway through our conversation a waitress approaches our table, bringing coffee. Winstone stops talking and looks up. âAmericano?â the waitress asks.
Winstone is drinking breakfast tea from fine china.
âNot for me,â he says, of the coffee.
The waitress hesitates, briefly confused, and Winstone goes on in an Anglo-Italian accent that is meant to mimic hers.
âNo Americano,â he says. âIâm Ingletere.â
I take the gesture to be sweet-meaning, not derogatory â an act to overcome embarrassment. (The waitress, who speaks fluent English, and who Winstone repeatedly calls âdarlingâ, does not seem offended at all.) Winstone owns a home in Sicily, which he visits âwhen the weather here is fucking like this,â he says, gesturing at the rain outside. He likes to drive there. (âStraight through France,â he told a friend of mine recently, because itâs âfull of French people.â)
It isnât difficult to imagine Winstone as a Brit abroad. Though he has previously suggested he might someday relocate, perhaps to Sicily, perhaps to âfarm olivesâ, perhaps in some way to avoid what he considers over-taxation, he remains proudly and steadfastly English. Much of our conversation focuses on the state of the nation, about which he is downhearted.
Winstone voted to leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. âI didnât want the French telling me how to eat my pork chops, thank you very much,â he says. It is unclear whether he stands by the decision, but on British politics he is plain. âThese cunts whoâre running the country,â he says. âConservative or Labour or Liberal â theyâre cunts. Theyâve no idea what the people want. They donât give a fuck. I wouldnât vote for one of them. I will not vote â my right is not to vote. People say, âOh, you must vote.â Vote for who? Give me someone to vote for!â He looks briefly enraged. âIn any other kind of work, if you promise to do something in the workplace and you donât do it, you get the sack. If I turn up on set and I donât know my lines, I get the sack, and rightly so. So when these cunts promise to do something and get into office and donât do itâ¦â He is clear on what must change in the short term, which includes more funding for the NHS. âNurses,â he goes on. âTheyâre trying their best, doing incredible hours, and they donât get paid fuck all.â After a while he adds, âThese people save our lives!â
Partway through our chat, Winstone talks of the necessity of a political âshake upâ. When I ask what a shake up might look like, thinking of Donald Trump, Winstone shakes his head. âDonât even go there,â he says, seeming appalled. âBut it needs to change. We need change. We need someone â I donât know who this is, or where they come from â someone whoâs going to be very fucking honest, who, if they donât know the answer to a question, well, they say they donât know the answer, but that theyâll find out. Most of them, they refuse to answer questions. Excuse me? Youâre supposed to be representing us. If weâve asked a question, answer the fucking question.â
I ask if he thinks he has a romantic vision of what England should be.
âYeah,â he says. ââCourse.â This vision comes from childhood. âAs a kid, you donât have the worries of the world on your shoulders,â he continues. âYou have the warm summers, and the lovely hay fields, and youâd go out into the countryâ¦â As a child, Winstone and his family visited the Essex seaside towns of Southend and Shoeburyness. âThat Englandâs still there,â he says. âItâs not the people in England who are ruining the country. Itâs the cunts who are running it.â
During our conversation, Winstone portrays himself as a man of the people, which I find difficult to accept. (While discussing his upcoming Sunday dinner, Winstone suggested he might âorder in sashimiâ, a decision that suggests he isnât struggling for cash.) Winstoneâs views are populist and generational. Asked what his children think of his opinions, he says, âWell, they donât always agree with what Iâm saying. My kids have got their own minds. And I like that. Iâve learned a hell of a lot from my kids, which is how it should be.â
âOver Sunday dinner,â I say.
âWeâre usually fighting over Sunday dinner,â he says. Earlier heâd said, âWe ainât the Waltons.â
I ask if he considers legacy.
âLegacy,â he says. âWhatâs that?â
âDo you think about what youâre leaving behind?â I ask.
âNo,â he says. âThings change so much that work can date very quickly. There are new ways of working now, new ways of acting. Some things Iâve done hold up and thatâs great. Some things donât.â He pauses for a while, then moves in a different direction. âI guess my legacy is my kids. Theyâre the ones that carry on, do whatever theyâre doing. And, hopefully, Iâll leave them something that will help them along the way.â
Damsel will be released on Netflix on Friday 8 March. The Gentleman is out on Netflix on Thursday 7 March. A Bit of Light will be released on Friday 5 April