Vinnie Jones opens up on going toe-to-toe with new love, being bollocked for porking out & fears over Meghan sex scenes

THERE probably aren’t many teetotalers out there proudly running a fully-stocked pub. But then again, Vinnie Jones isn’t most men. Vinnie Jones gives The Sun’s Clemmie Moodie a tour of his country pile Credit: Louis Wood Emma Ford and Vinnie Jones at the The Gentlemen series two premiere in London Credit: Getty Just as football is a game of two halves, so FA Cup winning Vinnie’s life can be neatly divided into two: his first as a mildly terrifying defensive midfielder, his second as a bona fide Hollywood superstar. Dressed head to toe in proper Lord-of-the-manor attire, 2026 Vinnie Jones is a gentleman in every sense of the word. Sign up for the Showbiz newsletter Thank you! Click here to watch Clemmie interview Vinnie on board his flash chopper Which is how it comes to pass the former Wales captain and his lovely girlfriend, Emma Ford, are generously giving me a guided tour of their beautiful 2000 acre West Sussex grounds – plus the aforementioned pub, which they’ve named Traveller’s Rest. READ MORE ON VINNIE JONES Teetotal Vinnie is now a country gent Credit: Louis Wood Meghan Markle is tipped for a role in series three of The Gentleman Credit: BackGrid “Right, let’s show you round the mad-house!”, he chuckles, hurtling around the grounds in an open-top 4×4. The couple’s two dogs, Pip and Kenny, are balanced precariously on laps, paws on the bonnet. “I pinch myself all the time that this is my life now,” he smiles. “I was a schoolboy at Watford, and early, early doors, the manager came round my house to see me, my mum and dad, and told us ‘Look, you’ve got more chance of the Pope coming round here for tea, than, you know, making it. “And now, here I am 60 years old, (actually, 61 Vinnie), and I’m still here, I’ve done all this. “I am a workaholic, just trying to provide for my family. That’s what keeps me grounded and keeps me going in the same direction. Most read in Showbiz Vinnie has been teetotal for 13 years Credit: Louis Wood Vinnie as Geoff Seacombe in The Gentlemen Credit: Christopher Raphael/Netflix “But listen, you don’t pay for all this [gesturing around the farm] with reputation. “You’ve got to get up every morning and graft it, and graft it, and graft it. “And when you think you’ve arrived, it will kick you in the bollocks. That’s how I live my life.” Of course, much is already known of Vinnie’s extraordinary life. A regular on both the front and back pages of the newspapers in the eighties and nineties, his reputation as a hardman preceded him. ”God, I hate it when journalists quote sh*t like ‘Oh Vinnie Jones got sent off after three seconds, and got 12 red cards’ – it’s such a lazy copy and paste job”. That’s me told. But he also captained Wales, played 446 professional league games for clubs including Wimbledon (he was an enthusiastic founding member of the notorious Crazy Gang), Leeds, Chelsea, Sheffield United and QPR, and scored 33 league goals. Plus, of course, that Cup final 1-0 victory against Liverpool in 1988. “People say I was a ‘workhorse,” he says. “Well, you ain’t so much of a donkey if you’ve played almost 500 games. You’re a bit of a thoroughbred, whatever way you look at it.” There is also that photo, taken 38 years ago, of Vinnie grabbing the, erm, testicles of Paul Gascoigne. Brilliantly, Vinnie has since had the original photograph commissioned into an oil painting, one that now hangs pride of place in his Palm Springs getaway. Sweetly, too, the seats his mum sat on to watch his FA Cup triumph now sit on his tennis court. After my tour, I am taken to (one of three) of Vinnie’s helipads, where a great, gleaming beast of a helicopter is waiting for us, supplied by luxury holiday business Ventus, ready to whisk me back to London. (I can quite safely say that not once in my 20 year journalistic career has a celebrity ever put on a chopper). But more on this later. While Vinnie’s life has been filled with highs, he has also suffered immeasurable humanising lows – none more so, perhaps, than the loss of his beloved wife of 25 years, Tanya. She passed away, aged just 53, from a six year battle with cancer. The following year Vinnie described the prospect of marrying again as an “impossibility”. But then the unthinkable happened, and in 2024, the “hardman” rediscovered his soft side falling in love with his gorgeous PA, Emma. They had worked together on his Discovery show Vinnie Jones In The Country, and are now developing their own farm-based reality series. Seeing them bantering back and forth, and finishing one another’s sentences, they are clearly very, very happy. Fresh-faced Emma – “Please, please can you make clear I am 49, not 61 as one article quoted. 61 ffs!!!!” – is also a delight to be around. Like Vinnie, she is also 11 years sober to his 13; “it wouldn’t work if one of us drank”. It is clear who wears the trousers in this relationship – “I mean, Vinnie doesn’t even know where we keep the teabags in our house.” So has Vinnie reconsidered his position on remarrying? He has. He smiles – which he always does when talking about Emma: “When you lose someone, when is it ever acceptable to meet someone new? There’s no right or wrong. “Did people want me sitting there, f***ing miserable, as I was in Covid, just watching every single episode of Mad Men and staring out the window, going deeper and deeper into a black hole? It’s no life. “And Emma got me out of that. I love her, I love her energy; I think that’s the attraction… I am the male version of her. She’s just brilliant isn’t she? “We go toe to toe but she’s a little bulldog so in the end I just give in and go ‘ok, whatever!’ “I wouldn’t be able to tell you either way what’s gonna happen but I can tell you that I’m very, very happy and we have such a laugh. We bounce off each other, and we tummy laugh. She doesn’t put up with my bulls***. “Listen, when I first lost Tans and I was soaked in grief and everything, yeah, you do say things. You know, ‘I’m never going to get married and all that’. “But now, I wouldn’t say ‘never’ about anything now. Not at my age. “For people going through grief, it’s only time that will help. Time isn’t going to cure anything. It ain’t going to get you over it. And it ain’t going to stop you thinking about that person. “But time is a massive journey and each day it WILL kind of ease.” Dispatched to interview Vinnie, a rare legend in his own lifetime, I was, well, a bit nervous. After all, and he might not thank me for this reminder, he once famously bit the nose of a journalist. And I quite like my nose. But, within an hour, Mr Jones rapidly enters my Top Ten Celebrities of all Time(™). Warm, engaging and hugely self-aware – “Ooh, I have loads of ADHD traits but I’m not the sort of person to seek a diagnosis” – no topic is off limits. We conduct our interview in a luxuriously comfortable Ventus helicopter, a company for which he is a proud Ambassador. Our charming pilot, Frazer, regularly flies A-list celebrities and has even shuttled members of the royal family, which is a nice touch. I feel in safe hands. A prize draw, essentially it’s a part-charitable venture in which entrants pay from £10 for a ticket in the hope of enjoying private jets, helicopters, a stunningly luxurious Croatian villa or an all-expenses paid jaunt aboard a super yacht. With 20% of all of the profits going to charity – Vinnie hand-picks them – in July the company’s first ever winners, Jenny and Richard from Essex, were packed off to Hvar, with a £10,000 cheque in their back pocket. Says Vinnie: “I know the guys behind Ventus Prize Draws, and I wanted to help them out. It’s a brilliant venture – people get the most extraordinary prizes and then some incredible charities benefit, too. “I’ve got full reign over where the money goes and where it goes, which was important to me because there are so many times you’re like, where does the money actually go? It can get so watered down. “So what I want to do more than anything at the moment is start off locally, like with the scouts and help them out, as well as a mental health charity, and then keep building on a national scale so that all corners of Britain can benefit.” It turns out that over the past three decades, Vinnie has donated or helped raised over £4mn. An OBE, surely, beckons. Big-hearted Vinnie replies to every single letter that comes his way – “Emma is a stickler for that, and I feel I have a real duty to help people especially those going through grief.” On the topic of mental health, Vinnie adds: “It’s a massive thing of mine. “Because me, as a person, would never maybe have never wanted to be in a place where I’d be sitting here saying to you, ‘I really think I had some mental health issues’. But I did. “I went to see a psychologist in LA, a UCLA bloke, and I was saying, ‘what is it? ‘Why do I want to have a drink? Why then do the wheels come off?’. “It was self-destruct. Although I’d love to be able to have one or two drinks and stop, there is a chemical imbalance in my body that means I cannot. ”Now, I would no more put my arm in a f***ing fire than I would have a drink.” Vinnie goes on to recall his worst ever drinking episode which saw him down endless amounts of iced vodka from a luge, resulting in a two week hangover. At 61, bar a spot of football-induced arthritis in one knee – “bone on bone” – Vinnie has never looked or felt fitter. (“I do enjoy the odd facial but God, no, I have never had Botox!”) Surprisingly, he’s also a covert of intermittent fasting.“I eat twice a day: every 16 hours and every eight hours – I don’t think the human body is built for all these luxuries. Plus, it’s lovely when the ol’ suit fits nicely.” He admits can pork-up though. So much so, he recently got a dressing down from Guy Ritchie – his good pal, and man responsible for his big break in 1998 BAFTA-winning Lock, Stock & 2 Smoking Barrels – for ruining continuity. He laughs: “Last year we were filming in Lake Maggiore, and I went past the trailer and Guy gave me the old finger, beckoning me in. ”He went, ‘son!’ and then pointed me up and down. It turns out I can put on 10lbs quite easily…” Evidently, Vinnie is loving his second half. And people are loving him. He is currently starring in the second season of Netflix’s global smash, The Gentlemen. Naturally, it is another Ritchie special. As one commentator observed: “A Guy Ritchie set is famously defined by three things: steak, cigars and Vinnie Jones”. “I think I’ve matured a bit now as an actor,” he muses. “And I think people are accepting a little bit more although it grieves a lot of them to say, ‘oh, he’s the killer, or the kidnapper – he’s actually got some depth.” Recently, Meghan Markle was linked to the third series, which begins filming in Morocco this week. So, what’s the truth? Sadly for Suits fans, she is not after talks fell through. “Well, I haven’t seen her on the cast list,” reveals the dad of two. “I think that’s dead and buried. “We can honestly say now that it ain’t happening, and you’d be a bit of a knob to think the idea was still alive. “Plus it would be weird to see her cast in a sex scene, horrifically bad, given, ya know…” Given, yes, Prince Harry. Finally, it is time for Vinnie to pack me off on my chopper, armed with a bottle of champagne which he gallantly opens but, obviously, does not quaff). A Gentleman to the last. Waving, he beams: “I’m on my journey, and I am very happy. “I know where my journey starts. I don’t know where it finishes, but I’m on my journey.” And yep, it’s a fun-filled one.* Vinnie Jones is an ambassador for Ventus Prize Draws, where you could win a £250,000 holiday of a lifetime plus £20,000 in cash – with paid entries from just £10. Find out more and enter at ventusprizedraws.com Comment now