Vinnie Jones

The last time I was this close to Vinnie Jones was four years ago at Goodison Park. I was in the front row of the Lower Gwladys Street stand, he was about to take one of his trademark long-throws, and 30,000 Everton fans were suggesting that his primary purpose in life was masturbating.

I remember renewing my passport and thinking I ought to put wanker where it says profession, he laughs. It didn t bother me then, and it certainly doesn t bother me now with my acting career taking off.
Taking off is right. Having received rave reviews for his Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels debut, Jones is either in, or about to start work on, five major films. Not bad for a bloke who Johnny Giles persistently described as one of the worst footballers he d ever seen.
He probably thought that all that stuff he said about me in Ireland didn t get back, but it did, he growls switching into Big Chris-mode. I m glad I haven t ended up like Johnny Giles a sad old git who makes his living out of slaughtering other people. I tell you what speaks volumes the fact that you hardly ever see him at PFA (Professional Footballers Association) dos. People go, Oh, that Vinnie Jones is a bastard , but I couldn t do what he does for a living. There s a nicer side to me than that.
The 35-year-old is in town today for the Irish premiere of Gone In 60 Seconds, the megabuck car heist movie that finds him starring alongside such Hollywood A-Listers as Nicolas Cage, Robert Duvall and the Bardot-esque Angelina Jolie.
A few years ago the only roles for British actors were Hugh Grant sorts of ones, but now we re the automatic choice if they want a villain or a hardman. It s good box office cause they get loads of extra media coverage here. That Vinnie Goes To Hollywood documentary which was on the other day was worth a couple of million pounds in advertising to them. Compare that to the #500,000 they paid me, and they re quids in.
Although Jones mute character, The Sphinx, is only on screen for 15 minutes, it so happens that he s in all the best scenes.
Yeah, they re pretty evenly spread throughout the film, and normally coincide with something or somebody getting blown up. I ve also been really pleased with the reaction to my speech at the end, which, y know, shows me in another light.
To be honest with you, he confides, my initial reaction when I got the part was one of relief. Waiting for the phone to ring, I d thought that Lock, Stock... was maybe a one-off, and I d have to think about going back into football, or TV, which I d had several offers from. It s mental what s happened, really, but I just enjoy it. I have a giggle when I go to bed and I have a giggle when I get up in the morning. The dole, building sites and Wimbledon FC aren t exactly your traditional Hollywood career path.
Was he disappointed reading through the Gone In 60 Seconds script that he didn t have any sex scenes with Angelina Jolie?
That would ve meant having Billie Bob Thornton on my case, so nah, I was quite relieved.
If the role required it, would he be prepared to appear on screen with his crown jewels showing?
If it was in good taste, and meant something to the film, I d probably do it. I was offered a hundred grand to go in a big magazine nude, but I turned it down cause basically it was soft porn, and I m not into that.
Does he feel he d measure up okay, or would the studio have to hire a body double?
They only use a double if the scene s really dangerous... oh, I see what you re getting at. Nah, I think I d be able to handle the sex scenes on my own. Unless it was a very cold day!
For all of his fearsome nose-biting reputation, Vinnie Jones is perfectly capable of laughing at

himself when required. Indeed, the Johnny Giles rebuke aside, there are few glimpses this afternoon of the infamous temper that s got him into trouble on and off the pitch.
I m just my own self, he reflects. If people are rude to me or my family, I go off the handle. I ve had a few scrapes, as we all know, but in most cases there was provocation. The one I really, really regret was biting that journalist geezer after the Ireland v. England game. That was a dumb thing to do, but y know, good or bad, you learn from your experiences.
Prior to what he describes as one of my darkest days , Vinnie had been in Dublin trying to find the birth certs that would ve enabled him to play for Ireland. Was he disappointed when the search proved fruitless?
I missed going to a World Cup because of it, so yeah, I was pretty gutted. My grandmother knows that she was born in Dublin, but try as we might, we couldn t find the records.
I feel very at home here. All of my wife s family are Irish one side from the North, the other from the South and we ve just bought a site on the Ring of Kerry where we re going to build a house. There s so much hassle in the UK, from the press and everything, that you don t get in Ireland. The people here are so innocent they don t begrudge success, or set you up to knock you down. I may be flavour of the month at the moment in Britain, but give it a while longer, and they ll have the knives out for me.
As one of their senior players, was he for or against Wimbledon s proposed move to Dublin?
100% for. Sam Hammam (the Wimbledon chairman) called Joe Kinnear and me in and said, You ve got a duty to promote this , which we did. I d have felt sorry for the fans in South London who d supported us through thick and thin, but the response to Premiership football here would ve been fantastic. Whether the FAI like it or not, it will happen sometime in the future. And when it does, the person who should be in charge is Joe Kinnear.
Out of the game or not, Vinnie was heartbroken last season when, after 14 years of defying the odds, the Dons dropped down to the Nationwide league. Generally a live and let live sort of a guy, the relegation has left him with a pathological hatred of Norwegians.
I d gather up all of (sacked manager) Egil Olsen s signings and dump them in the River Wandle at the bottom of Wimbledon s training ground, fumes their former number 5. He might have got a medal for services to Norwegian football, but I d rather give him a right hander. He ripped the heartbeat from the club in seconds. He insulted those who had fought for the place against the odds. To make matters worse he bought dross. I used to wear the shirt with pride. We all did. But there are loads of them now who just wear it to keep warm.
For the benefit of hotpress non-footballing readers, Wimbledon s giantkilling escapades were inspired by the camaraderie that existed between their ragbag squad of players. Known collectively as the Crazy Gang, their bonding rituals have become the stuff of sporting legend.
They cut your clothes up and they strip you when you go out for your first training session, and leave you up the top of the field with nothing on. And smear Vaseline over the windscreen of your car and put gravel on it.
Once you ve had it done, you do it to everyone. Once, one of the lads was in a bit of bother and the reporters came down and one of them just wouldn t give up hassling him. He was an arsehole so we stripped him and threw him in the stinging nettles.
The Selhurst Park faithful responded in kind, with an impressive array of laddish chants.
Show us your arse was the most common, cause we actually did that when I was at Wimbledon. We were on the halfway line and did a moonie. It was a testimonial game so we d planned it. The F.A. fined us all #750.
Given the ferocious commitment that he always showed on the pitch Jones was red carded 13 times during his career it s a shock to hear that if he had to choose between acting and football, he d go down the thespian route.
The premier of Lock, Stock... was, for me, bigger than winning the F.A. Cup. It was an individual achievement, as opposed to the team thing where there s eleven of you out there, and you re only remembered if you score the winning goal. People don t know you played in the 88 Cup Final unless you tell em.
As soon as the gaff in Kerry s finished, Vinnie says that he s going to invite his friends over for the mother of all housewarmings. With these including Guy Ritchie and Madonna, it should give the natives something more glamorous to gawp at than Jackie Healy-Rae.
They re a class couple, who away from the spotlight lead a straightforward life. Madonna, more so perhaps than Guy, enjoys simple things like going for a walk, or inviting her mates round for dinner. She s not a big show off, which is why those pictures of her on holiday pregnant upset her. The level of intrusion she has to live with is frightening.
Is it true that Vinnie s going to be godfather to their baby?
Well, I ve told him I want to be, he divulges. I don t know what Madge s thinking is on the matter, but I m hopeful.
Does Madonna understand the offside rule?
Nah, I haven t explained it to her yet. She s the same as most Americans in that she s never been to a football game. When Jerry Prucarma gave me the part in ...60 Seconds, he had no idea that I d been a top professional player for 15 years. Sometimes you want to tell em, Look, I m quite a celebrity in England! You could be Ronaldo or George Weah, and 99% of people in Hollywood wouldn t know who you are.
It s a different story in Blighty, where Jones is fast joining the likes of Cilla, Parky and Barrymore as a national institution.
If you asked me on a scale of one to ten how recognisable I am it was probably five with the football and since the movies it s more like nine. So it s very hard to creep into the pictures. If people see me they re all saying, Goodonya . It gives me a buzz, y know, being the people s champion.
What s the most surreal thing that s happened to him since becoming a Hollywood star?
Me and Tanya sharing a table at the Oscars with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. I felt a total fraud being there, but during the course of the evening I had people like Michael Caine and Phil Collins come up to me and say, Well done! It was great, being known and acknowledged.
Another thing which made me go, Am I dreaming? , was John Travolta personally asking for me to be in his new film, Swordfish. He saw Lock, Stock..., loved it, and said to Warner Brothers, That s the geezer I want .
Due to start shooting in September, the romp features Travolta as the world s most dangerous spy, hired by the CIA to coerce a hacker into stealing $6 billion of government funds. It s no mere bit part, with Vinnie billed second over Hugh Jackman and Ben Affleck.
We had a meeting last week and apparently I m going to get #2 million, which will help pay for the house, he smiles.
For the time being, home is a palatial mansion in Beverly Hills, which used to belong to Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley. When he s not acting the tough guy on screen, Vinnie can be found putting it about with Hollywood United the Brits-in-exile footie team whose other star players include Rod Stewart and ex-Pistol Steve Jones.
The house, the work and the weather are all great, but the L.A. lifestyle itself is a bit too flash for me. A couple of months over there are great, but then I start missing my family and my dogs. I ve got two greyhounds Smoking Bullets and Smoking Barrels that are doing alright for themselves at the moment. Going to the dog track is a far bigger buzz for me than attending some glitzy Hollywood party.
One thing I realised very early on is that if you want to succeed in this business, you have to be prepared to graft. We worked out that during April, I spent more hours in a plane than I did my car. There was one occasion where I flew to Miami, did a photo-shoot and caught the next plane back. I was knackered for the whole bloody week.
While Jones acquits himself admirably in Gone In 60 Seconds charmingly vicious is the New York Times verdict the September 1st release of Snatch finds him playing an altogether meatier role.
It s not really a Lock, Stock... sequel, though with Guy (Ritchie) directing, some people are calling it that. It s a different plot altogether, and I m playing a different character, called Bullettooth Tony. There s everything in there illegal dogfights, Russian arms dealers, dodgy diamond merchants, and Brad Pitt, who s a bare-knuckle fighter by the name of One Punch Mickey.
That last detail should ensure that the film grosses far more than the #4 million it cost to make.
We became good pals off the set, Vinnie resumes. There was Guy and myself and Brad. I saw him recently and he asked me if I could try and get him some re-shoots on it, just so that he could come back. It s all because he loves the pubs over here so much!
Having run out of their own criminals to mythologize, it seems that America is developing the same taste for Ron n Reggie-style gangsters that s existed here since the 60s. Wielding film scripts with the enthusiasm they used to reserve for blunt instruments, Mad Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman and Dave Courtney have all been trying to sell Hollywood their life stories. Does it bother Jones that by glamorising that sort of lifestyle, he s upping the ante for some extremely nasty ex-cons?.
I think it s the times we re living in, he proffers. Footballers have become like movie stars, and those people you just mentioned are the new Robin Hoods. If you look back at history, the 99% of law-abiding citizens have always been fascinated by the 1% who go, Fuck off, I ain t prepared to live by those rules. When they go and see a film about The Krays, it s the myth they re buying into, not the violence.
Anyway, Lock, Stock and Snatch are both set in modern day London, and involve fictitious characters. There are similarities with the sixties, sure, but only because the films are trying to be authentic and that s how criminals behave.
What about his own brushes with the law as a teenager?
Me and the blokes I used to hang around with in Watford were rogues, not gangsters. We pulled a few stunts in our time, but none that involved guns and knives. We left all that stuff to the big boys, who we knew alright, but had enough sense to keep away from.
In the unlikely event that his next four films bomb, would he consider resuming his footballing career?
I m getting a bit long in the tooth to play at the top level, and with the greatest respect to the lads who are in the Second and Third Division, I ve no hankering to sign for Notts County or Barnet.
It d therefore have to be management, which is something I tried at Queen s Park Rangers as assistant to Ray Harford. The coaching side of things was great, but having to go and watch Sheffield Wednesday and Walsall reserves was fucking miserable. You d drive all the way up there, only to find the game had been postponed. If someone was to set me up with a decent First Division side, maybe, but I think I d rather do TV work. Like I said earlier, I was offered three shows after Lock, Stock... which were all quite interesting.
For the time being, though, he s enjoying having nice things said about him by journalists who previously made him out to be soccer s very own Fred West.
I had a lot of bad press in football, he acknowledges. Some of it was justified, and some of it was reporters having a pop for personal reasons. They d rip me apart if I was sent off, but completely ignore the occasions when I was Man of the Match . They expect all eleven players on the pitch to be Georgie Best. I was a good role model for kids who mightn t have had the fancy flicks and touches, but were willing to work their bollocks off to get in the team.
Talking of which, did he ever get to exchange two-footed lunges with Mick McCarthy?
Did I play against him? No. I ve met him loads of times, though, and he s a great fella. It s only now that people are starting to forget Jack, and giving him a fair crack of the whip. The Charlton factor aside, Mick was very brave to take the job cause of the great players he was about to lose. Andy Townsend, Ray Houghton, Paul McGrath they can t be replaced easily.
Who would he regard as Mick McCarthy s biggest asset at the moment?
Roy Keane, is the instant reply. To me, he s the ultimate midfield player. I can see where sometimes he loses it and all that, but you re in a sport that s got a lot of emotion, a lot of adrenaline. The character that he is, he s going to do that. If you rate ability out of ten, I was a five and he s a nine. With the acting, it s the other way around!
So Vinnie s seen that Walker s Crisp ad, then.
Fucking hell, he was worse than Gary Lineker! Great footballer, but nah, I can t see him nicking any parts off me.
Gone In 60 Seconds is on general release in Ireland.