Black Widow star Ray Winstone voiced his distaste for working for Marvel Studios in a new interview with Radio Times. The veteran character actor joined the MCU as villainous Russian general Dreykov in 2021’s Black Widow, but it doesn’t sound like he’ll be returning to the universe anytime soon.
It seems Winstone had a fine time making the actual movie, but he objected after the studio became overly involved in post-production. He recalled feeling somewhat insulted when he was asked by executives to tone down and change his performance in reshoots.
“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” Winstone said. “Then you find out that a few producers have come down and your performance is too much, it’s too strong.”
Reshoots, once considered the kiss of death for prospective projects, have become commonplace in the blockbuster era. Marvel typically budgets five days of reshoots into all of its productions from the beginning, using an initial cut of the movie to test audience reaction before going back and hopefully fine-tuning some of the loose threads.
But it’s still not a process embraced by all creatives.
“That’s the way Marvel works,” Winstone lamented. “It can be soul-destroying because you feel like you’re doing great work.”
Winstone told the outlet that he threatened to quit the production rather than go back and redo his performance, but was deterred over potential legal backlash.
“I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it because that was it for me,'” Winstone said of his work on the initial shoot. “And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise, you end up in court. It’s like being kicked in the balls.”
Though Winstone has appeared in a fair number of studio blockbusters, like Beowulf and Snow White and the Huntsman, he presumably hadn’t had one of his performances so micro-managed before working on Black Widow.
It doesn’t appear he needs to worry about Marvel calling him back into duty, though. His character died at the end of Black Widow, and he doesn’t have any MCU titles cued up in his filmography. Winstone is currently starring opposite Milly Bobby Brown in Damsel.
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This story was originally published February 29, 2024, 3:36 PM.
source: star-telegram
