Ray Winstone has described filming Marvel‘s Black Widow as a “soul-destroying” experience.
In a new interview with with Radio Times magazine, the actor, who played villain Dreykov in the Scarlett Johansson-led 2021 action-thriller, admitted that filming the Marvel movie “was fine until you have to do the reshoots.”
“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,” Winstone said. “It can be soul-destroying because you feel like you’re doing great work.”
The Sexy Beast actor said that he wanted to give up on the project altogether, but realised couldn’t as he was contractually obliged to complete it.
“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,” he explained. “Otherwise you end up in court. It’s like being kicked in the balls.”
Earlier this week, Winstone also admitted in an interview with The Guardian that he sometimes takes on projects he doesn’t like in order to “pay the rent”.
“You go have fun for six weeks, see how it turns out,” the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull actor said of the filming process. “If it turns out great, it’s a plus. If it don’t, it don’t. But you’ve had a great six weeks.
He added: “You do do films you don’t want to do. But you’ve got to do them because you haven’t worked in a little while and you’ve got to pay the rent.”
Winstone will next appear in Netflix‘s Damsel alongside Millie Bobby Brown, releasing on March 8. He’s also due to star in The Gentlemen, a new Netflix series from Guy Ritchie, set for release on March 7.
The trailer for the new Ritchie series arrived earlier this year and will introduce audiences “to a new slice of the world initially brought to life in Ritchie’s 2020 film of the same name,” according to a description from Netflix.
A synopsis added: “While the characters in the upcoming TV show will be totally different from the movie, The Gentlemen will have all the same bite — along with a bunch of fresh tricks up its well-tailored sleeve, as the new teaser trailer reveals.”