No more Mr Tough Guy
RAY WINSTONE is worried about ‘the law’. “I’m a bit uncomfortable being here. I keep feeling I could get nicked,” the actor says of being interviewed at the King’s Inns, Dublin, where earlier this year he shot Sky HD’s new series, Moonfleet. He adjusts his Michael Caine spectacles and I half-expect him to clutch his lapels and do a Del Boy chin thrust. ‘Awright?’
The Law that Winstone is so worried about is all around us. It’s in the wood panelling and the portraits on the walls of King’s Inns, Dublin, where earlier this year he shot Sky HD’s new series, Moonfleet. It’s a tale of derring-do, set in 19th century Dorset. Winstone plays a smuggler with a heart of gold. He’s good at that: playing the rough ‘diamond geezer’.
The 56-year-old ex-boxer is an East End boy who’s worked hard, battled financial setbacks and is now a movie star. He’s had roles alongside Jack Nicholson, in The Departed, and Harrison Ford, in Indiana Jones. He was mesmerising in Nil By Mouth and Sexy Beast.
He has a past reputation for being pugilistic. In his early days, he doled out a few “clumps” to “people who deserved it”. One (very tall) director physically lifted him out of a shot and got a head-butt in return for the “liberty”.
Today there’s no machismo, nor luvviness. He’s a man you’d like to sink a few whiskeys with. Winstone is so down-to-earth he turned down the part of McNulty, in The Wire, because he didn’t want to uproot his youngest daughter to the US. He lives in Essex with his wife, Elaine, whom he met while filming That Summer in 1979.
He offers me cake with all the care of a man repping for Mr Kipling. I decline, lying that I’ve eaten a half packet of Hobnobs for breakfast.
“Obnobs. Once you’ve started on ’em, you can’t stop. My favourite biscuit. The milk chocolate’s the gravy,” he says. So is his voice. It’s homely and thick, a mixture of wisdom, warmth and, possibly, menace. It’s so familiar, you feel you’ve met him before. You may have. He’s a frequent visitor to Ireland.
“The wife’s a Dublin gal, so we come over quite a bit. And I did King Arthur here, 10 years ago. A lot of that crew worked on Moonfleet. Great bunch of lads. We filmed in Dublin, Wickow, and down along the coast. It was lovely. The sea was like glass. They call it the Amalfi Coast further south of here [in Killiney]. There were seals coming up and watching us, and everything.”
Moonfleet — written by Ashley Pharoah (Life on Mars) — is a two-part adaptation of the classic John Meade Falkner adventure novel. Young John Trenchard (Aneurin Barnard) joins the local band of smugglers, led by Elzevir Block (Winstone). They hunt for a fabled lost diamond. Lorcan Cranitch plays Elzevir’s fellow smuggler, Meech.
Was it fun to film? “We loved all that swashbuckling stuff as kids, in the 1960s. Back then, you didn’t care about the moralistic part of the story, you just wanted the action. Moonfleet is a swashbuckler, but it’s also about a boy becoming a man. It’s great to be a part of it, because I don’t get many chances to play these kind of roles.
“People don’t write that kind of stuff any more. Nowadays, it would be set on an estate with a load of geezers stabbing each other, or something,” he says.
Winstone has experience of living on an estate. “I come from the East End and moved to an Essex estate when I was seven. It was like a village. I love that community feeling, and maybe I bring that across in some of the movies I do. That’s why I love making things like Moonfleet. It reminds me of how we used to live. My mum used to make dinners for the old lady who lived across the road. You wouldn’t see that now. It’s a reminder of how we could live.”
Winstone had an early affinity for acting, which was fostered by trips to the cinema with his fruit-and-veg grocer dad. He saw Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and thought: “I could be that geezer.”
Before the stage, he was a boxer, and won 80 of his 88 bouts. It put acting in perspective. “If you can get in a ring with 2,000 people watching, and be smacked around by another guy, then walking onstage isn’t hard.”
His big break came in 1977, through a mixture of chance and cockiness. After being expelled from drama school (for vandalising the head’s car), he headed to the BBC and blagged an audition for a role in Alan Clarke’s notorious play about Borstal life, Scum.
Clarke liked Winstone’s aggressive boxer walk and cast him as Carlin, a young offender who tries to become the ‘daddy’ of the institution. In one infamous scene, Carlin uses two billiard balls stuffed in a sock to beat one of his fellow inmates over the head.
Scum set Winstone on an uneven career path, until a Bafta-nominated role in Nil By Mouth (as an alcoholic wife-batterer) and then the part of Gal in Sexy Beast. Hollywood noticed and he landed a part in Ripley’s Game.
Is he drawn to playing troubled tough guys?
“No, I like to think that everyone’s got a mother. Everyone is loved by someone. Look at smuggler Elzevir, in Moonfleet. Back then, people had to do what was necessary to survive and look after their community. To me, someone like Elzevir is the good guy. I see men like him in the same way you would see Michael Collins. When you meet him first, he’s a vagabond. I love that twist of character, where you discover that he’s the man who’s going to show this kid how to live by a code. It’s that corny old line that ‘men were men back then’. Being a man is about looking after your family and friends.”
That sounds like East End palaver, but Winstone means it. Take the criticallypanned Fathers of Girls. The Guardian described it as ‘mawkishly awful’. Winstone did it to help a friend.
“Karl [Howman, the director] is my mate. I read the script and I said it’s great, Karl, do you want me to do it?’ He said: ‘What?’ I said: ‘Do you want me to do it? I’ll do it.’ He said: ‘What, really, would you do it?’ ‘Of course I’ll fucking do it. You’re my mate. We’ve known each other 37 years.’ So then we went and done it.”
For all his tough-guy credentials, Winstone doesn’t take himself too seriously. He says he had the “gravy” knocked out of him in Dublin. “There’s a prison scene in Moonfleet, where I’m chained up and I’ve got six Irish extras beating me up. I had padding on to protect my back. The lads hit me everywhere except the pad. I thought: ‘have I said something really bad about Ireland?’”
Winstone has been bankrupt twice, in the ’80s and ’90s. “I didn’t know how to handle money. It was just like a laugh, you know? I remember we got a cheque through the post for Robin of Sherwood. Instead of paying the tax, we went on holiday. ‘Come on, let’s go on holiday, you only live once and all that. We’ll worry about the rest tomorrow’.”
How did it feel to be bankrupt twice? “It was easier the second time. I told myself I had a choice: ‘I can either go to work properly or I can sign on. So I worked my butt off for three years. I’m not bankrupt any more. I’m now an upstanding citizen who pays his tax. I’m not ashamed of it. It happens to a lot of people. Look at what happened in Ireland. Everyone is skint now. People started to prosper and then someone pulled the plug. Something very wrong went on here. It happened in Britain after Thatcher but, here, it was like a big kick up the nuts. And no-one seems to have done anything about it.
“A lot of Irish people are bankrupt because the banks — or the government — have done something wrong. It’s not their fault. I think the bankers must be made accountable for their actions.
“Don’t get me wrong, some people just don’t want to pay their taxes, but there are genuine employers out there who have had the rug pulled from under them. A lot of them have killed themselves over it. I say ‘don’t top yourself ’. If you’ve built up a business once, you can do it again. It ain’t your fault.”
What advice would Winstone give Irish people facing financial ruin, as he did? He doesn’t hesitate. His thick finger spears the air and his defiant answer is aimed at the bewigged establishment ghosts that haunt King’s Inns.
“They can’t hang you for it,” he says. He’s not that afraid of ‘the law,’ after all.
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