Cary Elwes waited his entire career to work with Guy Ritchie: “A dream come true”
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Between The Princess Bride, Glory, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Cary Elwes was a hero to any movie buff who grew up in the late 1980s and early ’90s, but this working actor is himself capable of being starstruck.
In the pre-Internet era, Elwes might have actually been able to dupe people into thinking that he’s American, having starred as Tom Cruise’s adversary in Days of Thunder and played a ruthless serial killer in Kiss the Girls, but he is actually a British star, and as with nearly every British actor of his generation, he eventually found himself working with Guy Ritchie.
Ritchie didn’t start making movies until Elwes had already become a star, but he immediately had a significant impact on the nation’s genre storytelling. The blend of snark humour, flashbacks, high-powered action, and non-linear framing made his gangster films feel entirely unique; although there were many directors of the ‘90s who were trying to replicate the style of Quentin Tarantino, Ritchie proved to be a powerful storyteller in his own right.
The actor and director didn’t become a part of one another’s professional lives until both had entered the second stage of their careers, and although it briefly seemed like Ritchie was scaling up to make blockbusters like Sherlock Holmes and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., his stint as a studio hired hand came to an end after the box office failure of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and the negative response to his remake of Aladdin, after which he returned to his roots by making smaller British crime and gangster films, including the underrated Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, which reunited him with his frequent collaborator, Jason Statham, who starred as a superspy hired by the British government.
Elwes co-starred as a spymaster leading the espionage team, and told The Independent that working with Ritchie was an opportunity he had been actively seeking out. “I’ve been wanting to work with him for a long time,” he said, “It really was a dream come true”.
It’s high praise for an actor with as layered a career as his, but he was enthusiastic about naming Ritchie’s films that he most admired, saying, “I go right back to Lock, Stock [and Two Smoking Barrels] because that’s the one that made people sit up and take notice. I love RocknRolla, too! What a cast!”
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was Ritchie’s first film, and is credited with introducing the hyperstylised techniques that shaped him as a storyteller, while RocknRolla was a slightly more obscure gangster film that is nonetheless beloved among the filmmaker’s fans, Elwes included.
The partnership between the two seems to have done both of them a favour, as Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre was easily the most enjoyable film that Ritchie had made in over a decade, and inspired him to reunite with Elwes on the World War II adventure thriller The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
The man works at an alarming rate in developing both film and television projects, so it only seems like a matter of time until he finds another role for Elwes to knock out of the park.
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