Vinnie Jones has opened up about his 10-year rift with director Guy Ritchie.
In 2024, the footballer-turned-actor reunited with the director on the TV series The Gentlemen, a decade after they first fell out.
Guy directed Vinnie’s acting debut, 1998’s Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels, and the pair went on to reunite on Snatch. Since then, however, Vinnie had been noticeably missing from the director’s filmography.
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On the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s podcast, Vinnie claimed the duo “drifted apart through the booze”, after Guy called him up about casting him in his movie RockNRolla.
“Guy rang me about RockNRolla,” Vinnie recalled. “And I was fucking drunk, and I went, ‘No, I want this, I want that’
“ And Guy said, ‘Really?’. Very calmly. I went, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’. And then, I didn’t hear from Guy for quite a long time.”
Vinnie admitted he “missed out on a lot” until the director “held out an olive branch” by inviting him to join the cast of The Gentlemen.
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“Maybe I was about 10 years sober, and maybe that’s when he may have called me and went, ‘Okay, I’m going to give you another chance’, sort of thing,” he noted.
Vinnie said that while he and Guy never discussed what exactly had led to them reconciling, he thanked Guy for being “nice enough to hand out the arm of brotherhood, because we are brothers”.
The Mean Machine star also shared that he had, understandably, been concerned about joining The Gentlemen, in which he plays the loyal gamekeeper Geoff.
“We were doing the first scene on The Gentlemen,” Vinnie recalled, expanding on his first day on the set of the Netflix crime drama. “I was a bit apprehensive, and I’d gone in the trailer, and I didn’t want to go over to his trailer and all the things. So I thought I’d be professional.
“I hadn’t seen him for a long time. But it was the funeral scene in The Gentlemen. Guy is coming on set. So, we’re all stood round, I had fucking butterflies. I was like a teenager. I’m like, ‘fucking hell’. But I’m trying to look cool.
“He comes walking towards us and he just walks straight at me. Walked straight up and just went bang. Fucking hell, both of us in tears.”
Vinnie added that he’d never spoken to Guy about this special moment, remarking: “We got on with it, and away we went. I haven’t spoken to him about that, but I know him well enough.”
“Some things don’t need fucking talking about all the time,” he added, before joking: “It’s hard telling you that.”
The relationship between the two men has clearly been mended, as Vinnie will appear in Guy’s next movie, Viva La Madness, which follows a drug dealer laying low in the Caribbean, who is plotting his big return to London life.
Vinnie is also expected to star in season three of The Gentlemen.
