In the nicest possible way Ray Winstone is like a cockney bulldog on speed. One minute he’s skipping lightly through the homoerotic battle routines of ancient warriors: “They’d strip off, get the horn,” he says. “And then you wouldn’t know whether they’re going to stab you or f*** you!” The next minute he’s doing a singsong skit, Chas and Dave style, from the East End musical What a Crazy World: “Me dad’s gone down the dog track/ Me mother’s playing bingo . . .” Then it’s back to tales from the Hollywood front line: “I’m not intimidated by Scorsese and Spielberg, because they’re nice fellas.” Then it’s punch-ups in Spitalfields Market, p***-ups at American Robin Hood conventions, movies with Gary Oldman and “Old Roffy” (Tim Roth), and then back to the day he got “clumped” by his old man for cheating in a school exam.

And yet, throughout this scatter-gun chatter, more East End than jellied eels or Reggie Kray, the 50-year-old Winstone remains unfeasibly charismatic. Indeed, here on a cold Saturday morning in a swish London hotel, Winstone projects the kind of roughhewn authenticity and salt-of-the-earth machismo that has made him the casting agent’s first choice in Hollywood circles. The Hackney-born actor, famous for his gut-busting turn in Sexy Beast and for channelling screen psychopathology in movies such as Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, has suddenly hit the mainstream.

After Scorsese cast him as Jack Nicholson’s major-domo in The Departed, Spielberg quickly nabbed him for the wildly anticipated fourth Indiana Jones movie (Winstone has just returned from shooting in Hawaii, New Mexico and LA, and insists that he’d be contractually obliged to kill me if he revealed anything about the movie).

More importantly, Spielberg’s cohort Robert Zemeckis ( Back to the Future) was also captivated by Winstone’s inner toughie, and cast him as the eponymous hero in his $75 million computer-aided epic Beowulf. The movie is a visually ingenious revamp of the old and occasionally turgid Anglo-Saxon poem about a dastardly monster that’s terrorising a Danish coastal kingdom. The movements and performances of the entire cast, which also includes Anthony Hopkins (as the troubled Danish king) and Angelina Jolie (as the monster’s babelicious mother) have been filmed and then morphed into a series of computer-generated doppelgängers that look like variant versions of the actors. In Winstone’s case, though, there’s no resemblance. His Beowulf is a 6ft 6in Viking hunk with a geometric jaw-line, a rippling eight-pack and a penchant for naked sparring. “I told them that I didn’t want to know when he was naked because I thought it would be distracting,” Winstone explains.

“Instead we spent every day filming in these special skintight blue suits, showing up all your lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. Which can be hard when you’re standing in front of Angelina, who looks stunning in hers.”

The real surprise in Beowulf, however, is not the movie’s visual innovations, but its emotional kick, its understated sense of tragedy. Winstone provides the typical hardman fireworks, bringing the pitiless, bloodthirsty slayer to life.

“I’ve got a bit of that in me,” Winstone says. “I’ve got a bit of anger in me at times. And I know how to bring it out.” The movie’s co-writer, Neil Gaiman, argues that the character of Beowulf also requires an unusual amount of sensitivity, particularly in its latter stages. “There are plenty of performers out there who could do Beowulf in the first two acts,” he says. “But Ray’s one of the few actors who’s sensitive enough to project the kind of vulnerability that’s needed for the third.”

And this is surely the secret to Winstone’s success. For despite all the hardman posturing, the swearing and the fulminating-geezer persona, he is actually something of a softie underneath. This vulnerability is certainly there on screen, in the scared eyes of Gal in Sexy Beastor in the tortured self-loathing of his Ray in Nil by Mouth. And it’s there, too, in his own surprisingly sweet biography.

“People say to me: ‘Well, because you had such a tough upbringing, dah dah dah.’ And I go: ‘What? I never had no tough ubringing!’ I had a f***ing blinding childhood. I was really lucky. I come from a really good family and a really good home.” So good, in fact, that when Winstone, brought up in Plaistow, then a teenage welterweight boxing champ, asked his dad, a grocer, on a whim if he could take acting lessons, Winstone was duly indulged with a place at the Corona Stage Academy in Hammersmith, at £2,700 a year (in 1975 money that was a small fortune). Luckily for the Winstones, Ray Jr (his father was called Ray too) lasted only a year in drama school, and was expelled for bursting the headmistress’s tyres – “She didn’t invite me to the Christmas party, so I got the hump.”

Nonetheless he was buzzed-up enough by acting to land the central role in Alan Clarke’s controversial 1977 borstal drama Scum. Here he played the near-psychopathic gang leader Carlin with such unerring ferocity (“I’m the daddy now!”) that it would ultimately define his future career.

He skipped from TV staples such as Robin of Sherwood (in which he played the ferocious Will Scarlet) to a Ken Loach cameo in Ladybird Ladybird (as a psychotic wife-beater) to Oldman’s Nil by Mouth (another beater) and finally to his new Hollywood phase of accomplished tough-guy turns.

I ask him if it’s a burden being Ray Winstone. Being, first and foremost, the hard man. “Well, you create your own persona, don’t you?” he says, thoughtfully. “And you have to live with that. But the people that I meet, they don’t think that I’m a lunatic. And if they do, then that’s OK, because it means that I’m playing the parts all right.”

He adds, in an ain’t-broke-don’t-fix way, that being Ray Winstone seems to be working just fine these days. “Let’s get to the point: I’ve had a right result. I’m doing the business. You don’t get to work for Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg if you’re doing something wrong. I’m on the right track somewhere.”

In fact, he says, the Winstone effect is so prevalent right now that he’s starting to knock back offers. “I just turned one down,” he says, shaking his head. “It was a biggie, and good and all. But I thought, ‘I’ve had enough for a while. I’m knackered and need to recharge my batteries’.”

For the moment that means lounging around his Essex pile with his wife Elaine (they’ve been married for 28 years), and three daughters. His eldest two, Lois and Jaime, are actors too. Jaime has already made a name for herself in movies such as Kidulthood and the TV series Gold-plated, and is reportedly dating another cocker-ney progeny, Alfie Allen, younger brother of Lily Allen.

Winstone says that he never once discouraged his daughters from entering the profession. “What would I rather them do – be stuck in an office all day and treated like an animal?”

As for his own future, he says that Hollywood isn’t everything. “I’m quite aware that this ain’t going to propel me into superstardom. I’m not groomed for that.” He looks down at himself, sighs and smiles. “I’m 50, I’m overweight and I’ve got a one-pack. I’m Raymondo! And I’m just enjoying my time.”

He’s got form

1977 Starred in acclaimed TV drama Scum, and later in the film version
1994 Appeared in Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird, a docu-drama about the British social services
1997 Lead performance in the gritty Nil by Mouth
2002 Played a violent gangster in the sequel to The Talented Mr Ripley, Ripley’s Game
2003 Played Henry VIII in the ITV drama
2006 Appeared in Scorcese’s The Departed
2008 Due to appear in the fourth Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the the Crystal Skull, due out in May

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