Ray Winstone had his passion for acting reignited on ‘King of Thieves’ because he was working with the "cream" of British acting talent.
The 61-year-old actor appears alongside Sir Michael Caine, Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox, Paul Whitehouse and Sir
Michael Gambon in the crime drama about the 2015 Hatton Garden heist – in which millions of pounds worth of jewellery, valuables and money were stolen from a safe deposit facility in London by a group of elderly men in what was described as the "largest burglary in English legal history".
Winstone admits working with such a stellar cast gave him a buzz on set that he doesn’t always get when working on a project.
In an interview on UK TV show ‘Lorraine’, he said: "You get to a certain age and it gets a bit late to go and do anything else, I like what I do. Sometimes the job doesn’t always turn out how the way you want it to turn out and it’s not as good as you thought it would be, or maybe you have to do it because you’ve got to pay the rent and it can break your heart. But then you come to a job like this and you just get that buzz again because you’re working with the cream."
Winstone stars as his childhood friend Danny Jones – who is currently serving a seven-year jail sentence for his part in the robbery – in the movie and he went to visit him in jail before he began filming.
The ‘Sexy Beast’ star admits his old pal was disappointed when he found he was going to bring him to life on the big screen because he would have preferred Brad Pitt to portray him.
Winstone revealed: "I went to school with Danny, I sat next to him at school … I went to prison to visit him before we started filming, not really to learn anything about him because I knew all about anyway, it was just out of respect really to tell him I was going to play the part. He was a bit gutted it wasn’t going to be Brad Pitt. He gave me his blessing, it’s just something you do … It was kind of weird to play him because I don’t look nothing like him, he’s as fit as a butcher’s dog."
Ray Winstone got to work with the ‘cream’ on King of Thieves
