‘You get starstruck, especially with the old celebrities.’
This isn’t the reaction you’d expect from , acting royalty and legendary hard man who has worked with the likes of and , but even he admitted to feeling gnawing nerves around the greats.
But when the 67-year-old finally bumped into one of his heroes – a Hollywood legend – he wasn’t able to fully bask in his starry glow… because he got arrested.
Ray chuckled when he recounted this unexpected twist to Metro.co.uk at the Corinthia hotel ahead of the release of his latest show, series The Gentlemen, his first collaboration with director Guy Ritchie in which he plays drug kingpin Bobby Glass.
He was joined by his co-star Kaya Scodelario, 31, who plays his daughter Susie Glass and is best known for playing the perennially cool Effy in the Channel 4 teen drama Skins.
She was also caught unaware by Ray’s unlikely tale, exclaiming: ‘That wasn’t where I thought that was going to go!’
Ray explained that the first time he was starstruck was when he encountered the late James Cagney – renowned for his tough man roles in films such as The Public Enemy, Taxi! and Angels with Dirty Faces – strolling through Piccadilly Circus.
‘My mate was driving him and I saw him get out of the car. James Cagney is one of my heroes – and I just didn’t know what to say,’ he continued.
‘He walked into [a building] and my mate said he’d be back later on and told me to get back here. But I was going to see my agent; I was only a young kid, about 17 or 18.
‘Anyway, I was walking back across the road and I ended up having a fight with a guy on a motorbike and got arrested on Saville Row, so I never got to meet him properly.’
Despite his run-in with the law ruining the chance to meet Cagney, Ray joked that the whole debacle seemed ‘appropriate’ for the classic Hollywood star, given his back catalogue.
Not to be outdone, Kaya also recounted her own slightly mortifying encounter with The Rolling Stones musician Ronnie Wood, 76, admitting that she ‘lost it’ when she bumped into him in a hotel.
She regaled: ‘I did once chase Ronnie Wood through a hotel. Yeah, I lost it. I love the Stones.
‘Well, I saw him and I didn’t chase him but I was following behind him. And then he turned around and I didn’t know what to say. And I said, “Thank you for the music”.’
Laughing, she continued: ‘I ran off crying and I was like, “Why did I say that? Of all the things!”‘
However, not even Ronnie can quite top the cast of two BBC shows for Kaya: ‘I get most starstruck from seeing people off EastEnders as I grew up with that stuff. And the new Gladiators on BBC One – it’s my favourite show ever at the moment.
‘I’ve met Johnny Depp and all these [celebs], and I see them as people, but if it’s someone of EastEnders or Gladiators then I freak out.’
In The Gentlemen, Kaya’s character Susie is far from a quivering stan. She’s tough, hardnosed, and runs an epic weed empire from a country estate.
Her inspiration for the part was her friends’ mums while growing up in social housing in north London. ‘[The Gentlemen] is a very similar world to a lot of people I went to school with,’ she explained.
‘So Susie is based on a mishmash of all the mums, who I always found was scarier than the dads. The mums were the ones you didn’t mess with. They were the ones that actually controlled what was going on. And so I kind of based Susie on a bunch of my friends’ mums.’
Ray also channelled his upbringing into the role. ‘It was kind of the world I grew up in the East End of London. It is what it is. Everyone was a gangster.
‘I was born 12 years after the Second World War when it was all going on: people working in the docks; this was getting nicked; that was going on.
‘It wasn’t so much the drug trade – that came a little bit later – but it was anything you could get. Usually, when things are bad that’s when you get gangsters: prohibition creates gangsters.’
And the lure of riches. At least, that’s what happens when the upstanding and aristocratic Eddie, played by The White Lotus actor Theo James, inherits his father’s huge estate. Among the portfolio is, unexpectedly, a weed empire.
But as he becomes entangled in the illicit business’s affairs, it proves a little bit too irresistible to shut down, and chaos ensues.
It is a spin-off of Guy’s 2019 film of the same name, which starred A-listers including Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrell and Michelle Dockery, as well as Hugh Grant, who has been having something of a career renaissance.
While The Gentlemen (the TV series) features a fresh cast, joining Ray, Kaya and Theo are the likes of Vinnie Jones and Joely Richardson, could we be seeing a cameo from a certain Mr Grant?
‘No idea, babe,’ Ray responded.
I guess we’ll have to tune in to find out…
The Gentlemen lands on Netflix on Thursday, March 7.
