Ray Winstone appeared in Marvel’s Black Widow, which came out in 2021 and which starred Scarlett Johansson as the titular character.
It was not fun, he said in this week’s issue of Radio Times, as he revealed his experience playing the film’s villain, Russian general Dreykov.
“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” he said. “Then you find out that a few producers have come down, and your performance is too much, it’s too strong… That’s the way Marvel works. It can be soul-destroying, because you feel like you’re doing great work.”
Winstone almost quit on the Black Widow project altogether: “I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it because that was it for me.’ And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise you end up in court. It’s like being kicked in the balls.”
Winstone has two upcoming Netflix projects, the Millie Bobby Brown-starring Damsel, and the Guy Ritchie-directed The Gentlemen.
He plays Brown’s father in the former, and a Cockney drug lord in the latter.
“Anyone can talk a good film, but you get a little smell sometimes if someone’s a bit more serious than others,” he said of Damsel and its director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.
Winstone also had praise for Ritchie, who he’s working with for the first time on the Netflix spin-off of his 2019 film.