The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Growing up, I weren’t no gangster’
Vinnie Jones explains how Guy Ritchie has finally cast him in the role he was born to play – a gamekeeper
When Guy Ritchie cast Vinnie Jones as Big Chris in his 1998 film debut, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, it felt like good casting. Sure, Jones was a professional footballer and had never acted before, but Big Chris was a thug, an urban enforcer, a man of extreme violence. Jones the footballer was the enforcer, too – the midfield hardman, the grabber of Gazza’s balls, the craziest of Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang. Unapologetic, apoplectic, studs up. Big Chris. Big Vinnie. Good casting.
Now, 26 years later (“Is it? Twenty-six years?” whistles Jones. “F--- me”), Ritchie and Jones have come full circle, with Jones cast in the director’s latest fast-talking, ultraviolent, very entertaining journey into England’s criminal underworld, The Gentlemen – a spin-off of the film of the same name and Ritchie’s first television project. This time, however, Jones isn’t playing the thug. He’s Geoff Seacombe, a humble, spiritual, solitary gamekeeper, who takes in injured wild animals, knows the woodland like the back of his hand, speaks softly and carries a shotgun. This, Jones says, is him. Not Big Chris. This, Jones says, is good casting.
“Growing up, I weren’t no gangster. Football and country pursuits were my only interests, still are. People think I’m from south London because I played for Wimbledon, but that’s not my world. I hate concrete, I just hate it. I was in New York for six months filming a show and I was just concreted in. Can’t bear it, mate. Can’t bear it.”
Instead, Jones grew up on the outskirts of Watford, in Hertfordshire – “beautiful countryside” – where his days were filled with fishing, ferreting and birds of prey, “I weren’t hanging around the local pub, running over to the bookies and back. That came later.” His father, Peter, was a gamekeeper and taught his son to fish and shoot; if he hadn’t been a footballer, Jones says, he’d have been a gamekeeper, too. He is currently a patron of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation. And, now, he’s Geoff Seacombe.
For the moment, Jones is concreted in, with me, in a central London hotel room (view from the window: concrete), pondering how his life turned out this way and discussing his reunion with Ritchie.
Recently turned 59, Jones is nothing like the meathead his on-pitch and on-screen persona would suggest; he talks nineteen to the dozen, shaking ideas around, to borrow one of his phrases, “like a pitbull’s got hold of it”. A widower since the death of his wife, Tanya, five years ago, from cancer, he spends much of the year on his 2,000 acres in West Sussex, renovating the 400-year-old farmhouse and immersing himself in nature.
Since Lock, Stock, Jones has been an actor in demand – alongside Ritchie’s follow-up, Snatch, he was cast in the Hollywood action movies Gone in 60 Seconds and Swordfish, and has never looked back. He’s worked with Nicolas Cage, Derek Jacobi, Dennis Hopper, Ricky Gervais, Stallone and Schwarzenegger; he’s joined the Marvel universe via X-Men; he’s done Big Brother and The X Factor (both in the UK) and The Masked Singer (in Australia).
Jones was fly-fishing on the River Test when he realised he wanted to change his image. “Two lads come round the corner,” says Jones. “One of them dropped his rod. He went, ‘Sorry, mate, I just never thought I’d see Vinnie Jones on the banks of the Test, fly-fishing.’ I said, ‘Well, now you have, mate,’ and I walked on.” On he walked, but inside he was troubled. “Instead of all that,” he recalls, “all the court cases and tackles, and videos on YouTube,
why don’t I show people what I’ve really got a passion for?”
Jones pitched his idea of a countryside television show for years – “BBC, all of them, none of them took it” – until Discovery+ commissioned Vinnie Jones: In the Country, a six-part series that follows Jones and his village chums as he renovates his farmhouse. It aired last year and Jones is hoping for a second series. It is, dare I say it, a little Clarkson’s Farm. “Chalk and cheese,” says Jones, shaking his head. “They’re completely different. Another Clarkson? No, it ain’t. My show’s about the countryside, it’s not about some novice who’s bought a farm.”
Jones is no novice, but, like Clarkson, he is a champion for agriculturalists and the traditional English country lifestyle. And, like Clarkson, he has a less-than-glowing opinion of Chris Packham. “Packham is hellbent on banning anything that’s shooting or fishing. But farmers and gamekeepers have reasons for doing this. I’m trying to educate both sides, but Packham is giving people a biased education. And the only thing he’s hurting is the true countryside.”
The sense you get with Jones is of a man trying to find some inner peace – his inner Geoff Seacombe – something that has been helped slightly by a smattering of therapy, and enormously by, 11 years ago, giving up the booze. Geoff makes his own sloe gin; Vinnie doesn’t touch a drop any more. Jones came from English football’s harddrinking days and that hedonism was easy to maintain once showbiz came calling (“but not drugs – never drugs”). “I was a laugh, I entertained the troops, everyone loved my company. But it quickly deteriorates.” So it does: in court in 2003, Jones pleaded guilty to assault after a booze-fuelled incident on board a Virgin Atlantic flight in which he told the cabin crew he could “get them murdered for £3,000”.
Jones hasn’t had a single drink since he quit and, from the outside, he’s made it look easy. “Look, mate, nothing’s easy. But when you wake up in South Dakota, handcuffed to a bed, with 68 stitches in your head… Guy said to me, when he was into all that Kabbalah, he said; ‘Vin, we all have this dog inside us. And yours is a big bastard. F---ing hell. You’re the most generous, likeable guy. Until the alcohol strikes.’ I wouldn’t want to go out of this world being that f--ing uncouth monster that got created. And that I helped along. But I always had good morals.”
Several times during our conversation, Jones mentions morals – good morals – and given that morality and religion play a large part in The Gentlemen (Pearce Quigley’s gangster, Gospel, is an Old Testament-quoting psychopath), I ask Jones where his morals come from. “My old man. He’s f---ing old school.” When his mates from youth club would go scrumping, Jones wouldn’t join in. “Nicking someone’s f---ing apples? I thought that was wrong.”
The Gentlemen is likely to put Jones back on the radar of British viewers, who may have not been keeping up with his work in US shows such as Deception and Law & Order, or low-key movies, including his own, The Big Ugly. I wonder what ambitions Jones the actor has, as he approaches three decades in the industry. I suggest theatre. Jones isn’t convinced. “Listen, I’ve got big balls and I’ve got big shoulders. I’ve done all this. I’ve done the Royal Variety show. I didn’t know what Macavity was before I sang it, but Andrew Lloyd Webber thought it’d be hilarious.” Andrew Lloyd Webber was right. Forget the fouls and the fights compilations, find the 2001 Royal Variety Performance on YouTube, and enjoy Jones strutting his stuff as the Mystery Cat. “The curtains went back, I spun around – and the Queen was right there! The red wine got me through it.”
Despite the big balls and big shoulders, does Jones get intimidated when he has to act opposite big names? The Gentlemen sees him share scenes with acting royalty in Joely Richardson, as well as the likes of Theo James, who trained at the Bristol Old Vic. “Joely Richardson? I worked with her mum. Yeah, I done a movie with Vanessa [Redgrave – 2007’s The Riddle]. She was in it, Derek Jacobi was in it. And I was No 1 on the call sheet, son. Do I get intimidated? No, because I put a cloak on.” Jones puffs out his chest, rolls his shoulders. “Crash, bang, come on, let’s have it. But then…” The chest droops, the shoulders slump, Jones seems to almost collapse in his chair. A long sigh. “Then it’s, ‘F---ing hell, I got through that again.’” Jones pauses. “I know deep down I’m a good lad.”
I shake hands with the good lad and wish him luck with the show. As I leave, the cloak goes back on. “You write it up how it happened,” he says. I’ll try, I say, I’ll see what my editor says. “Your editor? Forget your editor, get some BALLS.”
‘Red wine got me through singing Macavity at the Royal Variety show’