Ray Winstone Talks Starring in ‘The Gentlemen’ After ‘Falling Out’ With Guy Ritchie and His Gangster Persona: ‘My Wife Always Says, ‘Why Do You Look Like You’re Going to Kill Someone?”

variety.com:

Alex Ritman Many of cinema’s hard men are notorious softies in real life. Ray Winstone may well be one of those, even if he admits to not looking particularly approachable. “My wife always says to me, ‘Why do you look like you’re going to kill someone when you walk into a room?,'” he tells Variety. “But I don’t mean to!” Winstone’s long-standing status as the go-to man to depict violent approach-with-caution individuals or British mob bosses continues to serve him, however, as “The Gentleman” — Guy Ritchie’s eight-part Netflix spinoff of his 2019 gangster comedy feature of the same name — proves.

In the series, awash in the classic Ritchie mix of guns, drugs, violence, aristocrats, boxing and tweed, Winstone stars as a gangland patriarch and head of a massive weed-growing empire.

Because of course he does — who else would you cast as an elder statesman than the actor who has practically owned that screen role for 45 years? “It’s gone past very quick,” says Winstone of the years since his 1979 breakout as a violent teenage offender in Alan Clarke’s “Scum” (a part he only got after talking his way into the room and impressing Clarke with his confidence).

That same year, he also starred in U.K. classic “Quadrophenia” and drama “That Summer!,” for which he earned a best newcomer BAFTA nomination (he returned to the BAFTAs 18 years later with a leading man nominations for “Nil by Mouth”).