Ray Stevenson
On 21 May 2023, just four days before what would have been his 59th birthday, Ray Stevenson died, closing a career that had taken him from theatre training to film and television work spanning several decades.
Stevenson was born on 25 May 1964 and held British citizenship. He trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, which grounded him in stage performance before he moved into screen work. Over the course of his career he worked as a stage actor, a film actor, and a television actor, building a body of work across multiple formats. English was the language in which he worked throughout his professional life.
He died on 21 May 2023, leaving behind a record that stretched from his early theatre training through a sustained career across stage and screen. His time at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School remained one of the concrete anchors of his professional formation.
Quotes by Ray Stevenson
There’s not a lot of direct back story but you do get to see them playing around each other a lot.
I like bringing little subtle complexities to a character. It’s all about the subtext. No one can really describe or fully know another human being, even if they get a hook on them. It’s more about instinctively knowing whether you like somebody or not.
The weird thing is, in America, people were saying, “You’re not going to get recognized because all you’re going to see is basically your forehead and eyes.”
When many different voices send you in different directions, you can’t listen to your own.
For me, because I’ve had classical theater training, when people say, “Oh, my god, the play is amazing!,” I’ll never get to see it because I’m in it.
I’m Volstag and what you see is what you get. He’s a bon vivant lover of life epicurean goodfellow. He’s a god, which helps. He’s full of life. He reminds me very much of Falstaff. There’s a wonderful innocence to him and the steadfast loyalty of a big Saint Bernard dog.
As an actor, I relish and delight in doing things that I’m not necessarily the demographic for. This is a demographic that is touching the psyche of a certain age group, facing the real internal questions of people who are going through rites of passage into adulthood. It’s earth-shaking stuff.
If the project piques my interest and scares me a little bit, then it’s got me hooked.
Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘I’m a bad guy.’ They think they’re the right guy.