Why Ray Winstone nearly quit MCU’s ‘Black Widow’: ‘Soul-destroying’

Acclaimed British actor Ray Winstone says he nearly quit the 2021 MCU movie “Black Widow” — and likened its “soul-destroying” endless reshoots to being “kicked in the balls.”

Winstone, 67, who played villainous Russian general Dreykov in the movie — opposite Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow — made his damning comments about working in the Marvel Comics Universe to UK’s Radio Times.

“It was fine until you have to do the reshoots,” he said in this week’s issue of Radio Times, according to Daily Mail. “Then you find out that a few producers have come down, and your performance is too much, it’s too strong.”

“That’s the way Marvel works,” he added. “It can be soul-destroying because you feel like you’re doing great work.”

Winstone went on to say that he came thisclose to quitting the “Black Widow” movie altogether.

“I actually said, ‘You ought to recast it’ — because that was it for me,” he told the Radio Times. “And you end up doing it again because you’re contracted to do it. Otherwise you end up in court.”

He added: “It’s like being kicked in the balls.”

The Cate Shortland-directed film was delayed three times due to the pandemic, but the movie did boffo business at the box office when it was released in the US in July 2021 — grossing $80.4 million in its opening weekend. It also had the distinction of being the biggest movie opening since the pandemic began in March 2020.

It ended up earning nearly $380 million worldwide on a budget of $289 million.

The “Black Widow” cast also included Florence Pugh, “Stranger Things” star David Harbour, O-T Fagbenle, Rachel Weisz and the late William Hurt (who died in March 2022 at the age of 71).

The MCU has been criticized of late by acclaimed filmmakers including Martin Scorsese — who said Marvel moves are “not cinema” and compared them to theme parks. Francis Ford Coppola, meanwhile, told GQ magazine that a Marvel movie “is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different.”

Winstone, a two-time BAFTA nominee whose career stretches back 50 years, has appeared in movies including Scorsese’s “The Departed,” Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “Cold Mountain,” “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll.”