Vinnie Jones On Acing Tough In Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels

On the pitch, he monstered Steve McMahon and reduced Gazza to tears, but how easy did the Wimbledon legend find it to transfer his hard man ‘skills’ to the silver screen?

In the wake of its success, it’s hard to believe anyone had doubts about Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. But in the run up to its release in 1998, all the buzz was that the gangster movie was going to bomb. Why? Well, there was the fact that no one had heard of leading men Nick Moran and Jason Statham. Then there was the writer-director Guy Ritchie whose only significant work to date was a string of German music videos. All if all that wasn’t enough, the picture starred Vinnie Jones. Yes, nose-biting, testicle squeezing Vinnie Jones, the most certifiable member of Wimbledon’s Crazy Gang.

If anything was more surprising than the presence of the former Wales captain, it was the fact that Ritchie had written the role especially for him. As the X-Men star explains, “I asked Guy whether that was true and he said that the Vinnie Jones-type characters he’d seen in movies before always bored him. So he went out and got the real thing.”