Ray Winstone is well known for playing hard men and is regarded as the archetypal geezer. But, in the flesh, the actor comes across as gentle and friendly, a rather cuddly soul.

“It’s a lovely day and I’m earning a crust,” Winstone burrs in his famous thick East End accent as he sits down to take a break on set. “It’s alright. We could be unemployed, couldn’t we?”
Winstone is in Ireland to shoot Moonfleet, a two-part adaptation of English novelist J.Meade Faulkner’s famous tale of smugglers.
“It’s the kind of thing that you could put on Christmas Day and watch it with your five-year-old and your Nan,” he reveals. “It’s a family kind of thing. You’re dealing with a time when there was blood and guts. There’s quite a bit of that, but what I love about it is that it's an adventure. For the older audience there's a message about the world today. It’s about where the money goes.”
The contemporary resonances aren’t lost on Winstone.
“I’ve been reading the papers here and it seems that you’re in a worse position, what with the European thing and what these scallywag bankers have been up to. The normal people in the street have to pay for it. I guess when you look at what’s happening, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, you wonder how do people survive?
You look after your own first, which is what my character in Moonfl eet does. You look after everyone else when your house is in order.”
Winstone is a graduate of the school of hard knocks. Born in Hackney, he grew up on a housing estate in Plaistow, East London. His dad sold fruit and veg while his mother emptied slot machines for a living.
“When you’re a kid on an estate it’s tough,” Winstone says. “If you do go to university and learn something, where do you go to get a job? Then, you see a kid driving by in a nice big car and he’s a drug dealer and everyone seems to think there’s an easy pound note out there. There’s not. You get fifteen years. That’s the reality of it. Or you end up dead or killing someone.
“There’s no easy way out of it. On TV we can portray that this is quite a glamorous lifestyle. It isn’t. The reality brings tears and tragedy. That’s a sign of the times I’m afraid.”
Winstone was twice declared bankrupt in the ‘80s. What advice would he off er to anyone who fi nds themselves in such a devastating situation?
“It’s not the end of world,” he answers. “I was a young fella and I started earning some money. I always thought that, with the next pay cheque, I’ll pay what I owe. I’m sure loads of people have made that mistake. I went further down the road and ended up owing a hell of a lot. There seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel. They can’t hang you for that.
“What I decided to do was to work and work and work and pay it back. It was a lesson for me, because I couldn’t allow myself to get in that situation again. I couldn’t not pay them back. Where do you go from there? You’ve got to be a man and be straight with them. In my position, there’s no way back. There are no backhanders. Everything has to go through the system, so you’ve got to understand that and work your nuts off and pay.
“My big problem with tax is where does it go? It doesn’t go towards education, building hospitals or more nurses. It doesn’t go on a police force. It goes on a new Olympic stadium or a new rail link that knocks 15 minutes off on the time it takes to get to Birmingham and costs billions. We can have that when the country is a good state, but it’s not. I’m think I’m entitled to ask the question where does my money go? Because it seems to me it doesn’t go anywhere I want it to.”
A born fighter, Winstone twice secured the London schoolboy boxing champion title and represented England twice at junior level. The actor won an impressive 80 out of 88 bouts in a boxing career that spanned a decade.
“I’ve seen my fair share of violence in society,” he says. “Boxing was a great thing because it channels your aggression in a certain direction. It’s a plus. I met some of the best people I’ve ever made the acquaintance of in my life through boxing.
They’re gentlemen. I only met one boxer I didn’t like. The rest of them I had great respect for and I think you take that into the workplace. You respect the people you go to work with and who are very good at what they do. You even respect the ones who aren’t, because of the fact that they actually put their gloves on and stepped through the ropes.”
After Moonfleet, Ray appears in Noah, a ‘Biblebuster’ also starring Antony Hopkins and Russell Crowe. “I’ve worked with Anthony Hopkins before and he’s a great man,” Ray reveals. “I’d never worked with Russell. You hear all these things about Russell. He was terrific. I had a ball with him. When I was told Russell was playing Noah, I thought, ‘You’re ‘aving a laugh. Russell playing Noah? He should be playing the Devil!'”
Winstone is refreshingly honest on why he chooses a mixture of commercial and independent films. “The big movies are sometimes the ones you read and go, ‘Oh no’. You do them to pay the rent,” he admits. “It’s a terrible way of looking at it. Still, it’s true. It’s the small ones that have no budget that you want to do because they’re the characters you want to play. You get over that and you go on set on
King Arthur and there’s a wall that’s a quarter of a mile long that’s just been built. You start thinking about how many people they need to go to the cinema for them to get their money back.
“If it’s a good film then fine. If it doesn’t go well, you think ‘wow, you could have made 30 films for that!’. I’ve got a feeling about Noah though. I think it’s going to be a very good film that people are going to be watching for a very long time.”
Another way of paying the bills is advertising, and Winstone is well-known nowadays as the face of online gambling site Bet 365. He's an omnipresent fixture at halftime at UK Premiership games on television quoting the odds for next goalscorer.
“I get asked for betting tips all the time,” he laughs. “They want to know how I know the odds for the next game. They haven’t figured out that I’ve already laid all these things down and it ain’t really me saying it in real time.
“I’ve been asked to do bank commercials and insurance. I won’t do them. I don’t like them. The bookies was the best for me. It pays very, very well. Part of my business is that you advertise. It’s part of your game. Having a bet in the pub with the boys is one of the pastimes I like. It’s your choice if you want to have a bet or not, so I’ve no qualms with it.”
Winstone has fond memories of shooting King Arthur in Ireland. “When I was on King Arthur we were out all the time,” he recalls. “I think everyone was drunk on that job for four and half months. I was staying in the Four Seasons. I had to get out of Dublin because I was on the piss the whole time. I found a place between Newtownmountkennedy and Roundwood, on an old farm. Nothing changed! It’s like your national sport. It’s unbelievable.”
Another project in the pipeline is a film about Nick Cave’s life entitled 20,000 Days.
Winstone is also lined up to play the titular anti-hero in an adaptation of Cave’s novel The Death Of Bunny Monro.
“I’ve had it in my lap for about four years,” Winstone reveals. “Then Nick took it away and wrote a bigger story. It’s changed. It’s very dark, like Last Tango In Paris meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He’s really fucked up, but it’s one of these things that you can’t put down. I’ve been pushing it and instigating.
It’s just about getting the time with those two to get it done. I’m sure it will happen. It’s too good and too diff erent not too. People will either hate it or love it. There won’t be any middle ground.”
Winstone is almost universally beloved. Has he ever worked out why?
“I don’t know,” he laughs heartily. “If I knew the answer to that question, I’d bottle it. I’m a kid off the streets off East London. I’m a very lucky boy. I should have never been in the arts. I’ve no family in it. My education has been working in this business. I couldn’t read until I was 12 or 13. And I couldn’t read properly until I picked up a script.
“My education has been traveling and working in this game and reading stories and learning about diff erent things. And, above all, looking out and speaking up if I see something that isn’t right. So how do you bring that to the shows you do? You make things like Nil By Mouth or War Zone or Sexy Beast because they have something to say. Of course, not every job you do has something to say. You do them because you have to pay the rent and they’re fun. Moonfl eet is a family show. We haven’t set out to make a show with a point. It just happens to be the story.
It’s an adventure, a great old-fashioned style adventure. There’s a reasoning behind it I really like.”
Moonfleet will go out over the Christmas period on Sky 1 HD.