A couple of months ago I met the character actor Ray Winstone for tea and coffee. We sat at a booth in a restaurant linked to the London hotel he books whenever his work schedule requires him to stay overnight in the city. Winstone, who has been acting since the 1970s and who has created several unforgettable characters, was open and uninhibited – fine, sweary company. He presented to me as a committed family man keen to maintain links to his east London childhood: his accent is how you’d imagine it; he asks his three adult daughters to lunch every Sunday. But we also chatted politics. Winstone voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum, a decision we discussed at length. “I didn’t want the French telling me how to eat my pork chops, thank you very much,” he told me, winkingly. I presented Winstone’s populism in the interview, and it sparked reaction across social media from people on both sides of the political divide. In an interesting turn of events, several commentators accused me of being anti-working class. Sometimes it’s better not to look.
This meeting became an Observer Magazine cover story. You can read it here – please do. But for various reasons, most of all word counts, several topics of conversation could not be included. The first was that, partway through our conversation, Winstone admitted to lying in interviews, at least at the beginning of his career. “Years ago I used to make things up,” he said. “I told one journalist I was Scottish. He said, ‘Where was you born?’ I said, ‘Glasgow.’ I’d had enough. I was being rude, I shouldn’t have been. But it was printed.” The story made us both laugh, but it also made me grimace – this is a disconcerting thing for an interviewer to hear. Of the several stories he told me during our meeting, which were completely accurate, and which had been exaggerated? Does he really have Sunday lunch with his daughters every week? I sensed yes. But above all I got the impression Winstone sometimes gets bored of the sound of his own voice. Like most actors, he would prefer to forgo the press commitments that come with the release of a new project. When he told me that, recently, he has been taking part in video content that will be shared on social media as well as the usual print interviews, and that social media stars had been making him do odd young-person things on camera – day in, day out, for the past two weeks – I thought: fair enough, Ray.
Ray Winston at the Repton Boxing Club, east London. By Simon Emmett
The other thing was this: Winstone has a lot of beautiful things to say about marriage. He and his wife have been together for almost 45 years. When I asked what the secret to a long and fruitful relationship might be, he replied, “I don’t know. I don’t know, really. Its not always great, is it? But you work at it.” It was while talking about his family that he seemed most genuine. He went on, “It’s too easy to walk away nowadays. I’m sounding like my dad now. But you know what I mean? You’ve got to work at things. You’ve got to love. You have to do the gardening. If you ain’t been doing the gardening, you’re fucked. You’ve got to nurture things, even when you don’t want to, even when you’ve had a row, even when you want to fuck off.”
Winstone’s comments resonated, and for a while there was silence and I thought about doing the gardening. But then he changed his tune – became suddenly cheeky. “But why is it that we’re always wrong? I’m not always wrong. But we’ve got to say we’re wrong. Alright,” he went on. “You have to suffer that.”
A work update
Since I last took to Substack, I’ve published interviews with Patrick Stewart, Robert De Niro, and the young British actor Leo Woodall. The interviews with Stewart and De Niro, which both broached the topics of fathers and fatherhood – my bag! – helped me make the shortlist for Broadsheet Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards, which is nice news.
As ever, if you read anything I write, thank you!
Peace and love,
Alex
Hi Alex really enjoyed the Ray Winstone article he is an actor I have grown up with and always enjoyed his work. Keep up the good work. Marian