Vinnie Jones: ‘My career flew off the rails. The wheels were going. There wasn’t a spare seat!’
I am, obviously, scared of Vinnie Jones. Even though he is calling from New York, 3,000 miles and five hours away, I keep expecting him to click his neck three times and pull me into a breathless headlock. But instead, he is sleepy and then charming, and doesn’t threaten to kick my face in once.
He is sleepy because he was up until 2.30am shooting Law & Order: Organized Crime, in which he appears in the recurring role of Albanian gangster Albi. “Going toe-to-toe with Christopher Meloni,” he smiles, “a legend in the acting world.”
The Law & Order gig helps mark a third epoch in Jones’s acting career, one that, at 23 years and counting, now far eclipses his time in professional football. The first boom era saw him back-to-back in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Gone in 60 Seconds, Snatch and then Swordfish, before his first lead role in Mean Machine. It was capped by a triumphant turn in 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand, in which he delivered arguably cinema history’s first ever meme-inspired line of dialogue (“I’m the Juggernaut, bitch!”). Then came era two: a fairly significant period in which Jones would turn up and do a head-butt in every straight-to-DVD release you ever saw.
“If you look at my career, it flew off the rails,” reflects Jones, 56. “Went up, went to Hollywood, everything else: bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. The wheels were going, it was a downhill train and everybody was on it – the train was full! There weren’t a spare seat! – and we loved it and enjoyed it and it was a fantastic part of my life. Never take it back.”
He pauses for breath. Jones, it turns out, loves an extended metaphor. “But then the train starts going uphill, and slowing up. And you’ve got to reinvent yourself; you know, you’ve got to get the train to the top of the hill, so you can go again.”
The current stop is Rise of the Footsoldier: Origins, the fifth instalment in the franchise, originally based on writer Carlton Leach’s account of his days as a bouncer turned nutter in the 80s Essex ecstasy-dealing scene that ended in the Rettendon murders buthas evolved its own complex mythology.
Origins follows Tony Tucker – still, head-spinningly, played by Terry Stone – as he rises through the ranks from muscled playboy to a drug addict making increasingly desperate and misguided plays for power. It is a clas