Jaime Winstone says she’s entering her prime as star's Strictly journey continues

It’s a Monday evening, and despite being put through the paces of her “hardcore” day-long Strictly Come Dancing rehearsal with her partner Carlos Gu, she’s still living off the fumes of the show.

“It’s incredible, and exhilarating, but also so nerve-wracking. But I’m kind of here for that chaotic energy.”

Winstone is a “fizzing ball of energy”

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If there were any celebrity well-equipped to deal with the chaos of the 13-week BBC dancing competition, it’s 41-year-old Winstone, who seemingly has unending bags of stamina.

But despite showing accomplishment on the dance floor, she is still battling some anxiety about the show.

She told The Standard: “My biggest fear is if I fall down the stairs

“Then I’ve been having a lot of dreams where suddenly I’m dancing with no clothes on or — oh my God — my tooth just has fallen out or something.

“But I’ve done a lot of work with anxiety. When you do feel the fear, that is it’s a very close feeling to excitement.

“You know? You’ve just gotta learn how to rewire that. Ultimately, you’ve just gotta have fun.”

Winstone is currently taking part in the BBC dancing competition, Strictly Come Dancing

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A fixture of the London scene since she was a teenager, Camden-born Winstone came of age very publicly, partly due to her famous father, actor Ray Winstone, but also because of her own move into the acting world, with breakthrough roles in Bullet Boy and Kidulthood.

Winstone learned her craft by shadowing her dad on set in LA, working as a camera assistant and runner on films such as 2008’s Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, or 2006’s The Departed with Cate Blanchett, who proved to be a massive inspiration.

“I think Cate’s one of the most phenomenal actors,” says Winstone. “I watched her on set, and I think that instilled a lot of confidence in me at a young age just to watch someone who now is Oscar-winning.”

A spate of roles followed with more acting greats. In 2010’s Made in Dagenham, about the Ford sewing machinists’ strike, she shared the screen with Andrea Riseborough, Geraldine James, Sally Hawkins and the late Bob Hoskins.

“Do you know I’d just given birth before that audition?”

“I never knew how to do an improvised scene until I was with these heavyweight actors,” she says. “I would happily sit there and just get lost in Sally Hawkins’ performance.

“And I remember at one point Bob saying in one scene: ‘Come on you, little one, get to the front’ and moments like that in my career just changed my path.”

One of Winstone’s best performances was appearing as Dame Barbara Windsor in the 2017 BBC biopic Babs. Winstone as Windsor was described by The Guardian as “delicious…sweet and self-knowing…with a perfect Babs laugh, deep and dirty as a drain”.

“Do you know I’d just given birth before that audition?” she asks now, referring to the arrival of her now 10-year-old son Raymond Junior.

“So I taped myself up, I bleached my hair, I wiggled my way into that audition and did the laugh. I actually met her when I was about nine, and I giggled behind her and she said ‘Oh, you should play me one day!’ and that was that. It stayed with me and I thought, well, this is my chance now.”

Winstone embodied the character of the young Windsor so well that she appeared as Babs again, as a young Peggy Mitchell, in a couple of flashback scenes in EastEnders in 2022.

Winstone learned her craft by shadowing her dad on set in LA

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But she was unsure about taking the role at first. “I questioned whether I should do EastEnders, because there’s a real cultural snobbery about soap work in TV work, which is ridiculous because they work so hard.

“What they have to deliver is insane. And this pace of it is almost like doing theatre, and it ended up being amazing.” So much so, she made a return to the same role in 2025.

Spending her late teens and twenties in London as part of the showbiz world naturally meant that Winstone indulged in all the joys of the mid-Noughties nightlife scene.

There was a whole crew of her mates, the likes of Kim Jones, Miquita Oliver and Pam Hogg. “I did a lot of stuff with [DJ] Jodie Harsh at that time,” she remembers. “Some nights, I would be spraying hairspray and holding up dresses for the queens to go on stage. We had a lot of nights in the Revuebar and Madame Jojos.

“I’ve always grafted from a young age. I’ve always worked, so I’ve always earned my right to dance.”

“I think you’re just on a natural high after you come off stage, so what better way to deal with it than dance your night away? I’ve always felt really at home in Soho.”

However, a lot of people seemed more interested in her life off-camera as well — at one point she was engaged to Lily Allen’s brother Alfie — which led her to be disparagingly branded as a “party girl”, a reputation that stuck with her for a long while afterwards.

“I’ve always grafted from a young age. I’ve always worked, so I’ve always earned my right to dance,” she says. “I think it’s really important to commit to certain things that make you really happy.

“It’s very easy for people to drag people down or be like ‘she does this’ or ‘she does that’. But, I’m very proud of who I am in that sense. And I was 21, running around from pub to club, like, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Now, like many elder millennials, she’s not exactly sober, but doesn’t drink when she’s working on big jobs, so she’ll be saving any celebrations until the end of her Strictly run.

The English actress portrayed a younger version of the iconic character Peggy Mitchell in Eastenders

She’s balanced it all out a bit more now, she explains, being in her forties, living in Hertfordshire with her husband, James Suckling, and their son.

The last time Winstone went as hard as Strictly on a dance floor was at their 2023 wedding in Sicily.

It was a ridiculously fun looking affair and she jokingly claims to have started the Big Italian Wedding trend, as not only did Charli XCX use the same location for her 2025 wedding in Tonnara di Scopello, but also the same wedding planner, as did countless other couples following the pair. “Everybody else copied me!” she laughs.

With the Winstone family in tow and a plethora of celeb mates, including Cara Delevingne, Melanie Blatt and Nick Grimshaw, it was a proper knees-up, says Winstone.

Winstone played a Tracey Emin figure who creates her art about her own life

When dawn rocked around, “Me and my husband were probably the last ones on the dance floor,” she says. “There were loads of people, actually. I think Sheridan Smith was definitely ruling at one point!

“Ray was there too, of course — he sang Elvis on the day, and later said the wedding took him “four days to get over”.

Speaking of Ray, he’s currently joining Winstone Jr on primetime, riding high with the success of the second series of The Gentlemen, in which he plays the gangster patriarch of the Glass family.

“He’s so good in it, isn’t he?” she says, proud of her old dad. “He’s doing the rounds as well. I’ve never seen him on so many podcasts – he’s so modern!”

She says that she and her dad constantly discuss potential roles and read potential scripts for each other: “I’ve always had a really healthy professional relationship with my dad. I’ve been very lucky to have someone so authentic and real, and in control.”

He’s an “extremely supportive” parent she says, adding that he’s currently watching her on Strictly, so don’t rule out the head of the Winstone family coming for a boogie in the crowd in one of the live shows.

“I’m pretty much having the time of my life at the moment!”

But the most important thing the acting don has taught her over the years is “the power of no”. She explains: “It’s so important. As is just believing in your choices. It can be really powerful.”

With her acting career spanning more than two decades, Winstone’s seen a lot of changes in the industry in that time.

The #MeToo movement also changed things for the better, with the introduction of intimacy co-ordinators on set, which Winstone helped to implement.

“I’m super proud to be a part of a bunch of women who helped change the laws,” she says. “The industry’s come on leaps and bounds, but there is still so much to be done.”

Some of her previous experiences may find their way into the semi-autobiographical film she’s writing about “how a girl navigates a man’s world in the 1990s”, which she would love to direct.

Carlos Gu & Jaime Winstone will return to our screens for Strictly Come Dancing this weekend

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After that, she’s set to star in a film about substance abuse called Sessions, and her dream role would be playing Stevie Nicks in her biopic.

Winstone feels like a woman on a creative high right now. “There’s all these rules that we have in place for women in their forties,” she says. “Like, suddenly, ‘you can’t do that’, or ‘you can’t wear that’ or, ‘you should be having a baby now’. I’m like: absolutely not! I feel like I’m about to enter my prime time.”

There’s just time to tell me excitedly that she was back in Sicily a few weeks ago for the wedding of her gay best friends. As she sums up: “I’m pretty much having the time of my life at the moment!”

And with that, off Winstone foxtrots — or jitterbugs or salsas, who can say until next weekend? — off into the night; tired, happy and leaving a trail of sequins behind her.