Ray Winstone Opens Up About Struggles on Marvel Set: “I Was Contracted, So I Had to Do It”
British actor Ray Winstone, known for his role in “The Departed,” spoke with reporters at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where he received the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo award for his contributions to cinema.
Looking back over his long career, Winstone said he feels the film industry has “become a business.” He talked about the difference between blockbuster movies like Marvel films and what he calls “cultural films.” “It’s all about selling tickets,” Winstone said.
“We see what’s happening in Hollywood with Marvel and all that kind of stuff… There is room for it, and it’s fun, but it takes away from getting cultural films made, which are best for the actors, [and] are really good acting parts. It’s getting more and more difficult to do that. If you’re not on social media now, they might not even consider you for a movie because they want a fanbase to come with that.”
Winstone shared his personal experience working on Marvel’s 2021 film Black Widow, in which he played the villain Dreykov, the man behind the program that turned young girls into deadly spies known as Black Widows.
He recalled the excitement of working with director Cate Shortland and developing his character. “We used to get applauded on set. It was probably the best thing I’ve done for a really long time,” he said.
However, Winstone described the difficulty of reshoots on the project. “Then I come home after finishing the job and get a call saying we need to do some reshoots. I say: how many scenes? [Cate] says ‘all of them.’ So I said she should recast [the role], but I was contracted, so I had to do it. I go back, they do my hair all nice, put me in the suit, and I couldn’t do it. I’d already done it. I thought, ‘I’m not doing it now. I’ve done it. That’s how it’s going to be.’ That’s rejection, you know? There’s nothing worse than doing something, leaving it on the floor, and then being told it’s not right.”
Winstone’s experience highlights a common trend in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. MCU films are well known for extensive reshoots, sometimes months after principal photography, to adjust storylines or character arcs. Examples include Avengers: Endgame, which had multiple rewrites and reshoots, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which also underwent major changes late in production.
These reshoots are part of why the MCU can deliver tightly connected stories across films, but they also create challenges for actors, as Winstone explained and may make the projects worse.
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