’ll say one thing for Jaime Winstone: the girl can drink. Once, at an awards
dinner, she strutted past, swivelled on her heel and slurred back at me,
“You’re beautiful” — which, more than anything, proved how sozzled she was.
Then, some months later, at 3am on a Tuesday night in the Soho Revue Bar,
she stumbled in wearing a tartan poncho, with frosted hair in a Pat
Butcher-style set. I said: “Why are you dressed as a little old lady?” Jodie
Harsh, the drag-queen nightclub promoter, told me not to be mean to her, and
I felt bad, but, of course Jaime doesn’t remember it — too drunk.
And lo, when she teeters up for this interview at teatime on a rainy Monday at
the Charlotte Street Hotel, she already has a glass of bubbly in hand.
“Champagne, babes?” she calls from the doorway and nips off somewhere to
rustle some up. “Phew,” she says, plonking herself down and handing me a
glass. “Now, get that down ya.” Good, I think. Most acting ingénues are such
dreary sorts, deathly earnest in the pursuit of fame. Not Jaime. “Let’s get
on it,” she cackles.
Winstone, 22, petite and pretty as a china doll, is the reigning queen of
London’s “yoof” scene. Her father is Ray, of course, the menacing bruiser in
Beowulf, and she is in a gang of second-generation media ruffs
much-documented in the tabloids. Her boyfriend is Alfie Allen — son of
Keith, brother of Lily. In fact, Jaime and Lily were BFs for a while, but
then Lily got sniffy about Jaime pinching her mates, and they had words, but
they’re, like, totally sound again now.
Yet somewhere between the booze-fuelled nights out and the gossip columns,
Jaime has managed to forge a respectable career. She burnt up the screen in
Bullet Boy and Kidulthood, and has two films and two big television shows
slated for release this year. Turns out she does a nice line in mouthy
cockneys, just like Dad.
She is here to talk about the first of the films, Donkey Punch. The title
refers to a grotty, wildly misogynistic sex act that, if interested, I
suggest you look up on XTube. Anyhow, a group of ladettes are on holiday in
Spain and one poor love gets donkey punched (with deadly consequences) and
the kids all turn on one another. It’s violent, nasty and will never win an
award. But Jaime somehow rises above the dross, flinging herself around a
cruise ship, covered in blood, with admirable brio.
She is obviously pleased to be getting so much work. “People are still saying
to me, ‘You only get it because of your dad,’ ” she says evenly, “but it
doesn’t work like that. You might get the meeting, but nobody is going to
pay you good money to do a job because of who your dad is.”
She swears the party-girl tag doesn’t help, either (though I have my doubts).
“The way I was brought up was to think of this as a job, a way to make a
living,” she says. “When I’m working, you won’t see me for months. You’ll
have good times and tough times — God knows, my dad has — but it’s not about
being famous. As soon as you go down that route, you’re finished.”
So, why all the pap-pleasing partying? “I have to say, I just love a party,”
she giggles. “I don’t go to have my picture taken — I genuinely like to have
fun.” Actually, I believe her. Winstone can work a room like a potty-mouthed
Tina Brown. She is utterly unfazed by people, thanks to years of hanging
around film sets with her dad, swapping stories with Spielberg and Scorsese.
Her little sister, Ellie-Rae, 7, thinks “you grow up and then go on telly”.
Winstone was born in Camden in 1985 and grew up on a council estate in
Enfield. Her dad’s career was on a bit of a downer in the 1990s, so she went
to the local state school, which she loved. The estate was very
community-minded, but after Ray’s star turn in Nil by Mouth, when the
Hollywood dollars started rolling in, he moved the family out to a mansion
in Essex and Winstone, then 15, became a tearaway. “I was a bit of a naughty
teen. I wasn’t vile, but I was bored. When we moved to Essex, I rebelled. I
got chucked out of school,” she grimaces, saying she basically refused to go
to any class she wasn’t interested in. “All right, I was terrible. I had an
attitude.”
She also developed a taste for a good night out. “I started going out properly
with my older sister. I remember being smuggled into Peach under her coat
when I was 14. It was amazing. I wasn’t aware of the drug culture before. It
was the real rave days. It was a bit wrong — I suppose I shouldn’t have been
there — but I’m a raver,” she cheers.
Too right. Having finished our drinks, we adjourn to the terrace, where Alfie,
Winstone’s 21-year-old actor boyfriend, is also drinking pink champagne.
(Nice life, eh?) “Shall we get on it?” she asks. “Yeah, babe,” says Alfie,
smiling. So we order another bottle and Winstone tells me how she got into
the family business. She had never wanted to act, but a casting director
took a punt and got her in for Bullet Boy and, with no training, she nailed
the audition. She left school the following year and, with interest
bubbling, moved to London to live in a squat with friends. “I was there for
a year and a half. My parents thought I was crazy, moving from a huge house
in Essex to a squat in Stoke Newington. My dad was, like, ‘You’re a nutter.’
I thought I was lucky living for free in London. ’Course, living in a squat
always goes horribly wrong in the end,” she concedes.
By now, a drunken haze has descended and Jaime calls fellow partiers Daisy
Lowe and Danny Dyer (“Where are you, Danny Dyer-bolical?”) to see who else
wants to “get on it”. As it is Monday, nobody, apparently. Instead, we float
off to Ed’s Easy Diner in Soho for burgers and beer, then more beers in the
cab on the way back to Alfie’s gaff in Islington for a pit stop. Lovely
Victorian townhouse, very luxe/arty. His mother, Alison, is watching telly
when we come in, and Jaime and Alfie pile onto the sofa opposite and chat
about their day. Alison, herself the Oscar-nominated producer of Elizabeth
and The Other Boleyn Girl, is a total delight, and tells a side-splitting
story about going hot-air ballooning with some chichi friends of friends in
Wiltshire the day before. “I was doing my best to be charming, admiring the
view and so on,” she tells us, in a voice much posher than her famous
daughter’s, “but I couldn’t understand why they kept trying to avoid me.” It
was only later, back in the car, that Alison realised one of her London
friends had pinned a badge on her jacket that read, “I love c**k”.
The kids scream with laughter. Jaime actually falls on the floor. With parents
like this, who needs to go out? But we mop our eyes and head off to the
local pub for last orders: Jack Daniel’s straight, lager chasers. My knees
are about to give out, but Winstone and Alfie are still chatty.
Winstone says she may do Hollywood — she has been asked, obviously — or she
may not. Meanwhile, she’ll have to deal with the tabloids. “It worries me,
though,” she says. “I don’t want it to fiddle with my career. I think it’s
really unnatural to be talked about like that. Ooh, Ray Winstone’s daughter,
Lily Allen’s brother. Is that interesting? Nah, course it’s not. They can
f*** off.”
Alfie says almost everything that is written about them is made up. When his
sister, Lily, was carried out of the Glamour awards the other week, there
was a shot of him prone on the pavement behind her. But he wasn’t that
drunk, he says: he was nobly trying to cause a distraction.
Before I end up like Lily, I bid farewell. As we stagger outside, Winstone is
bright as a button, raring to get to her meeting with the BBC in the
morning, then a premiere the next night. “What can
I say?” she says. “I’m 22. We’re meant to be having a
good time.”
In the era of Amy and Lindsay, it’s nice to meet a party queen who doesn’t
give excess a bad name. Long may she reign.
Donkey Punch opens on July 18
