Ray Winstone is well-known for playing tough men, but speaking to Reader’s Digest in the December issue, it becomes clear that he’s taking a different attitude to roles now that he’s getting older.
In his latest role, although he plays a smuggler, he says that the role has a little more depth and his character is dealing with a huge loss.
“I suppose I’m getting older,” he tells Reader’s Digest. “I’ve done all them films about society like Nil By Mouth—which I’m happy to do again. But you get to a certain age, and you start looking back on your life and what growing up’s all about. And it’s great when you can make something and feel all ages can sit down and watch it. Because I guess a film like [pitch-dark 1999 family drama] The War Zone is not exactly a Saturday-night-with-a-pizza type of thing.”
At the age of 56, he says he can definitely feel the generation gap. “I don’t understand the younger generation. I try to. Ben [Drew, his co-star on last year’s The Sweeney, also known as the rapper Plan B] was a great one to work with because he’ll talk about what’s happening on a council estate. I mean I’m quite aware of, you know, drugs and people getting killed and shot and all this b******s going on, but my answer to that is it’s all f******g wrong.
“I’ve lived in those places in the past [he grew up on an estate in Plaistow, east London] but it was a different time. It was the Sixties. Yeah, there were gangs, but it was your street against my street, you’d have a punch-up and that was it. Very rarely was someone stabbed or shot. Maybe we just didn’t hear about it, but today it seems like every time you turn on the news, it’s happened. Places where my grandfather might have lived are now no-go areas.”
Read the full interview in the December issue of Reader’s Digest.
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Posted by Marianne Kaskela.
