Eamonn Holmes has taken aim at fakery in the entertainment industry, saying that he has worked with “so many horrible people”.
On the latest episode of his podcast, Things We Like, the former This Morning presenter interviewed English actor Ray Winstone about his career and relationship with Hollywood.
When Winstone shared that he wouldn’t live in Los Angeles because its celebrity residents are often “wrapped up in a fantasy world”, Holmes revealed his dislike for “false” personalities.
Holmes, who presented This Morning alongside his ex-wife Ruth Langsford for 15 years, explained that his own refusal to keep up appearances in the entertainment industry has landed him in hot water more than once.
“That’s what the business is based on,” he said. “If I don’t like someone, they’ll know I don’t like them. And there are so many horrible people you end up with.”
He added: “People say, ‘Oh, he’s lovely, he’s fantastic’… If they say to me, ‘What’s that Ray Winstone like?’ I’ll say he is lovely and he is fantastic and people will believe me – because I wouldn’t say it if you weren’t.
“But so many are just false, false, false.”
Winstone reflected on his opinions of celebrity culture in LA, saying: “Every two minutes, it’s all they want to talk about. We talk about birds and football and boxing – they talk about movies.”
He added: “Even the guy who puts petrol in your car works in the industry.”
While Holmes did not name any colleagues, Winstone brought up his decades-old criticism of The Shining’s Jack Nicholson, 88, whom he found to be “very rude” when they worked together on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning 2006 thriller The Departed.
Winstone said: “We just didn’t get on. He’s just getting older, maybe there’s lots of things going on with him. I didn’t like him, I thought he was so far up his own arse. And he was very rude to me, and to my wife. If I had been a younger man, I would have knocked him out.”
Holmes’s comments come after he recently revealed that he is reliant on a mobility scooter following spinal surgery for three slipped discs and a double hip replacement. The presenter has been learning to walk again following the back surgery in September 2023.
He recently shared a picture from three years ago, which showed him standing at a film set, saying that seeing the photo had made him “sad”.
“Great picture popped up from three years but it’s made me sad – I could walk,” he said. “Got to redouble my efforts.”
