Repeat offender

In King of Thieves, Ray Winstone plays Danny Jones, a member of the crew behind the notorious 2015 Hatton Garden raid. It’s certainly not Winstone’s first time playing a crook or a cockney geezer.

You seem to be playing a criminal in this one. That’s never happened before.

It makes a change, dunnit? But the difference with this one is it’s a little bit of a comedy in a way. It’s a black comedy, I suppose. The way I look at it, it’s like an Ealing comedy. You know the old Ealing comedies?

Yes.

I didn’t kind of get that when we were doing it and that is probably a good thing. Because it’s all kind of natural and real and, all of a sudden, the humour comes out of the dialogue and the situation – I suppose a movie about a load of old boys is going to be funny.

Still, it doesn’t romanticise the crime.

You know, what these guys did at their age was quite phenomenal. I know it’s a crime and I know it’s against the law but at the same time there is something about it that makes you go, “Well done”.

It’s quite a gang you’ve joined.

You are kind of in awe, in a way, when you are working with these old boys because you sit down and have a cup of coffee and they tell you stories and they’re not telling you stories about acting and films they have been in, they’re telling you about their travels and their life. I enjoyed every minute with them.

Or they’re telling you about that time they

got knighted?

Yeah, they’re quite low-key about that.

Did you have to curtsey a lot?

With this mob? No, I can’t get down that low any more.

In Last Orders, you played Michael Caine’s son. So does that mean that you’re getting older or he’s getting younger?

Well, he seems to be getting younger and I am catching him up, I think.

How is the Hatton Garden job seen in Britain?

We are great on the Robin Hood sort of stuff, as they are in Australia and New Zealand. We love heroes such as Ned Kelly. There was kind of a euphoria when it came out that these men were 60 to 70 years of age, that these old-age pensioners did it and they are kind of masters of their craft. Everyone kind of thought it was either Albanian terrorists or Russian gangsters. But it was a load of old boys who were pretty good at what they done. The public seemed to warm to it.

In the film, you and the rest of the cast are seen as younger men in flashbacks from films you made years ago. What was yours?

Mine was from Scum, the borstal one from 1979. It was quite a clever little take on it. I think Danny did his bit of borstal, so it kind of fits in.

Have you met Danny Jones?

Yeah, I’ve met Danny. We got on, we’re friends.

Well, that’s one benefit of doing a job like this – you get Ray Winstone to play you in a movie.

[Laughs] It could have been better. It could have been Brad Pitt.

Given Danny’s now inside, you might end up making more by playing him than he did doing the job.

And I didn’t get the porridge at the end of it. Maybe, some of the jobs I’ve done, I deserved to get a bit of porridge for it.