In his spare time, my good friend Johnny likes to wreak minor havoc editing Wikipedia articles. Last year I became the new lead singer of The Cooper Temple Clause, who were reforming after a 15-year hiatus. His girlfriend, to this day, designed the interiors on the set of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. The far-right occultist David Wyatt invented his own soft synth, known as ‘Wubbage’ – at least until his acolytes discovered the lie. The changes have to be so subtle, Johnny always says, and on articles so unsuspecting and mundane, they don’t attract the attention of the site’s fastidious moderation team. I wondered if Johnny had been at it again when, while preparing for an interview with the legendary actor Ray Winstone, I noticed that hidden among the usual early life, career, legacy, and filmography, was a bold, uncited claim: Ray also added his London accent to a dance track in 1982 by Marsha Raven called ‘I Like Plastic’.
“Did I?” Winstone laughs incredulously when I ask him if it’s true. Surely Ray Winstone – hard man star of Scum, Nil by Mouth, and Sexy Beast fame – didn’t vocal an obscure HI-NRG tune popular in the gay clubs of the early Eighties. “I don’t know. I’m flattered. Maybe it's like one of those moments – if you remember it, you wasn’t really there.” The 68-year-old is talking to me via video call from his house in Sicily a week after his Sharif Hamza Sir! shoot, and is dressed in typical Winstonian garb: the tangerine-tinted sunglasses, the smart casual polo shirt, the slicked-back, argentine hair.
This year marks 25 years since Sexy Beast – which starred Winstone as Gal, a retired criminal living in the Costa del Sol whose life is turned upside down by the arrival of an old associate, the deranged Don Logan (a role for which Ben Kingsley was nominated for an Oscar) – premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Much like the tracksuits and Cuban collars of The Sopranos, Gal’s fashion sense is currently having a bit of a moment. The canary-coloured Speedos from the film’s opening scene still grab all the headlines, but the touches of geezery luxury – the Persol sunglasses, the open-collared shirts, the Tom Ford-era Gucci belts – can be found on every fashion-conscious man from Haggerston to Headingley when the sun comes out. It’s a style very much in keeping with Ray’s own. “Coming out of the East End, it was all about your clobber. You know, I always grew up wearing suits on a Sunday,” he tells me. Although the film’s fashion is “a bit more open neck, a bit more gold,” than what Winstone usually wears (saying that, he is currently wearing a gold necklace, “purely because [his] wedding ring keeps slipping off my fingers”), it’s clothing that resonates with him, and his working class background. “My dad had a great old saying – he said, ‘son, there’s no good being poor and looking poor,’ so you wear a suit, you know? It’s something that’s kind of stuck with me.”
In preparation for the interview, I went back and watched Sexy Beast for the first time since I was a teenager. You forget just how good it is: a surreal, sun-drenched crime odyssey that clocks in at a cool 88 minutes (the correct length for any film, by the way), and contains writing so good Winstone is still effusive two-and-a-half decades on. “Some films you work on; you change the dialogue a little bit to suit you or suit the character or the moment that you're in,” he says. “With Sexy Beast, you didn't change a word because if you did, it didn't work. I thought the two boys – David [Scinto] and Louis [Mellis] – did a wonderful job with the writing.”
Calling two middle-aged screenwriters ‘boys’ could be seen as patronising, but given Ray’s affable, avuncular nature it doesn’t come across that way – born in the East End of London in the late-1950s, he’s one of the few male British actors you could reasonably label an elder statesman; a National Treasure. “Oh, God – they bandy those words about quite a bit, don’t they?” he demurs. “I don’t know. I’ve been going to work for 50 years doing it, so hopefully by now I’ve got it right. Some of the time, anyway.” Despite his success, he would rather talk about “football or the kids or where we’re going on holiday” than acting, and maintains a group of friends from childhood in north and east London who work outside the business. I shift the conversation onto his beloved West Ham, who have, truth be told, had a torrid season.
“Terrible,” he replies instantly when I ask how he feels it’s gone. “It started off really poorly with Loopy Loo [Julen Lopetegui]. You know, I hate to speak badly of someone, but you just knew that this guy wasn’t right.” Of Graham Potter, the former Chelsea and Brighton man who came in at the start of the year, Winstone is more sanguine. “I like the way he’s sorting things out. I like the way he talks.” This season might be “kind of a write-off” for the Hammers, but he is “really optimistic about next year,” much like he is with the newish England manager Thomas Tuchel – although looking even further ahead he’s a fan of Howe, Potter, and even “a couple of ex-England footballers,” like Lampard and Gerrard. “They were asked to do a hell of a lot in big clubs to start with, which probably ain't the right way to go about it.”
For a lot of men my age, Ray Winstone is synonymous with the both the bet365 adverts that endlessly played at half-time of Premier League games – where a giant Ray head appears to give you the latest odds – and as the face of Holsten Pils where, in a callback to his role in prison drama Scum, he ponders which flavour of crisp is ‘the daddy’. It was a halcyon era where seemingly every celebrity bloke was doing beer endorsements: Jack Dee and Peter Kay were the face of John Smith’s, Jonathan Ross did Harp – and of course, Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer got his big break making critically acclaimed adverts for Stella and Guinness. These days, Winstone isn’t much of a pint man. “I stopped drinking for about six months last year,” he tells me. “I found it really easy to stop, to be honest with you. Then Christmas came along and then I started having a drink again. Then we went on holiday, and I said, ‘well, I’ll have a drink on holiday because there’s no point in going on holiday otherwise’. Then I came back in February and I stopped drinking again. So I’m feeling pretty good about myself. I’ve lost about two stone and I’m feeling fit.” When he is boozing, his drink of choice is a red wine, or “crushed ice, in a big glass, with a large shot of Jameson’s.”
Before our call ends, I ask Ray what it means to be masculine. He’s known for playing men you wouldn’t particularly want to meet down a dark alley, but each one of them, from Ray in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth to Colin Diamond in 44 Inch Chest, has a fragility and torment to them. “I don’t think it’s about having a hairy chest,” he responds. “It’s not about the physicality. It’s not about that. It’s very difficult to put your finger on it.” He pauses for a moment. It feels a bit like he’s genuinely never quite considered the question before, until, with aphoristic aplomb, he declares: “I think being a masculine man is about women feeling safe around you. Yeah. If they feel safe and comfortable around you, I think you’re on the right track, you know?” There’s undoubtedly nothing sexier than that.
