The straight-faced role Ray Winstone couldn’t take seriously: “That’s when I started to laugh”

Posted On December 27, 2024December 27, 2024

Like most actors in his position who are recognisable to mainstream audiences without being movie stars in their own right, Ray Winstone has been lured into some expensive productions based largely on the number of zeroes on the check being dangled in front of him.

Everyone has bills to pay, and sometimes actors need to suck it up and chase the money. While there’s nothing wrong with that, the balance between art and commerce usually results in the scales being tipped too far in one direction, as Winstone discovered when he had a thoroughly miserable time playing a one-and-done Marvel Cinematic Universe villain in Black Widow.

Suffice to say, challenging himself as a performer was not the main motivator behind the gruff cockney signing on for the likes of fantasy blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey rom-com Fool’s Gold, voicing an anthropomorphised beaver in The Chronicles of Narnia, going uncredited as the godly Ares in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, or shouting his way through Netflix swords-and-sorcercy flick Damsel.

There’s definitely a happy middle ground, as Winstone can attest, having worked with Martin Scorsese on The Departed and Hugo, two productions that were as expensive as they are acclaimed. However, when his agent reached out to see if Winstone would be interested in playing the antagonist in Noah, finding out Russell Crowe was set for the title role didn’t have the desired effect.

“That’s when I started to laugh,” he admitted to The Telegraph. “Then I asked who I’d be playing, and they told me I would be Tubal-cain, a descendant of the original Cain. And I started laughing again. Then I asked who the director was, and they said Darren Aronofsky. That’s when I stopped laughing.”

The mere mention of the director’s name was enough to convince Winstone that Noah “was going to be a serious piece of work,” but he didn’t immediately board the ensemble. After confirming his interest, a script was swiftly sent out, only for the prospective villain of the piece to be less than convinced by what he read. Fortunately, Aronofsky was on hand to clarify a moment of miscommunication.

“I said, ‘It’s terrible, Darren’, because it was really bad,” he recalled of the script. With Aronofsky left bemused, it transpired that the screenplay Winstone perused was two years out of date and had been redrafted numerous times since then. “So they sent me the latest one, and it was blinding.”

At first, Winstone thought the idea of playing the baddie in a biblical epic with Crowe as the guy who shepherded two of every animal onto a giant boat to escape a flood was preposterous. His mind didn’t change when he read the script, although it did once he actually got hold of the one he would be shooting.

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