Danny Dyer interview on Rivals, Mr Bigstuff and life in the public eye

Danny Dyer interview on Rivals, Mr Bigstuff and life in the public eye | The Gentleman's Journal

“This is fucking amazing,” Danny Dyer says, looking around the Mandarin Oriental Hotel restaurant in Knightsbridge, where we are installed on a velvet banquette. “It smells expensive in here.” He picks up a pair of chopsticks lying on the table. “I do love a chopstick, me. You know, my driver moved to China when he was 16. He’s from Enfield but he speaks Mandarin. He even eats pasta with chopsticks. Apparently, the higher up you hold them, the more civilised you are.” Just in case I missed it, he gives me a demonstration of his chopstick skills.

Dyer, 47, is a curious fish. During the course of our conversation, the Gucci loafer-and-gold-watch-wearing chatterbox will alternately come across as a cheeky teenage boy in grown-up clothing (today he’s wearing a black polo neck and black jeans), a prodigious gutter mouth (“David Cameron is a twat,” is just one example) and, more than anything, a boy who rose from the ashes of a hard-knock early life to a man who now has the love of the nation and drives a Bentley.

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But there’s an unexpected side to him too. Dyer’s an eloquent sage who thinks deeply about, among other things: classism, mental health, what masculinity means to him, and how his years of hell-raising and drug-taking affected those closest to him. For all his hard-man talk, he’s clearly a bit of a teddy bear at heart.

“Right,” Dyer says, slapping his meaty thigh, either because he’s readying himself for combat, or, more likely, because he doesn’t love interviews. Not that it shows. He delivers every word with a Guy Ritchie-grade punch.

We’re here to discuss the just-released second series of the madcap comedy Mr Bigstuff (he won a TV Bafta for Best Male Performance in a Comedy for the first series) in which he stars as a lovable nutjob called Lee — alongside Glen, his estranged brother who has come back into his life, played by Ryan Sampson, who also scripted the show. He utters the C-word throughout with delicious abandon.

I tell him I’ve just watched the first three episodes and offer that he seems made for comedic roles. “I love the discipline of it,” he says. “I’ve never really done it before. It’s such a different energy when you’re on set and you’re making people laugh.” He certainly does that. In one scene, we see him gambolling naked down a street, his bare bottom jiggling enthusiastically. “They put a sock over it. You wouldn’t want to see me from the front running with a sock, you know, over me cock and balls. They did try to make it the same colour as my skin, but the sock came loose and fell off.” Locals in the council estate where the scene was shot started filming him.

In another scene, Dyer’s character sits on an armchair wearing a pink dressing gown, a bottle of vodka in his hand, headphones on, listening to Barry Manilow while he sobs his eyes out. It’s a sweetly moving moment.

Masculinity, as well as trauma (of which he endured a fair share while growing up), are the two recurrent themes he will constantly return to during our conversation — specifically how one abets the other. “As an actor you need to have a bit of trauma,” he says, “a bit of self-loathing. And you’ve got to be very sensitive to tap into that stuff . We’re an odd bunch, actors. We are really odd human beings.”

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Considering he has a natural way with words, has he ever thought of writing his own show? “When you’re a young actor you just can’t be fucked,” he says. “As you get older, it starts to fascinate you. If I ever directed anything it would have to be something I’d written. You know, very working class. I’d like to use raw young actors who’ve never worked. But right now I don’t have any time. I’m too busy.”

He’s not kidding. In the interest of research I delve into his most recent outings: his highly entertaining turn on Desert Island Discs earlier this year, in which he riffs with Lauren Laverne about life. But it’s his music choices that truly resonate for their authenticity and lack of obvious curation: Bryan Ferry’s “Slave to Love”, Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell” and Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”, among others.

Then I watch his sweetly vulnerable and affecting turn on the BBC show The Assembly, a new format where a celebrity is grilled by 35 autistic and neurodivergent people with learning disabilities, who fire at him a range of unscripted questions that include class, therapy, money and his favourite kebab. It finishes with him sobbing uncontrollably.

Like his daughter Dani Dyer, who made her name on Love Island, Dyer senior has also recently turned to reality TV, appearing in Celebrity Bake Off, Celebrity Gogglebox, Who Do You Think You Are? (on which he famously found out he is a descendant of Henry VIII’s advisor Thomas Cromwell and, further back, Edward III), Danny Dyer’s How To Be a Man, and presented the game show The Wall.

But it’s his role in last year’s Disney+ show Rivals, based on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 best-selling novel of the same name, that seduced the nation and finally made the industry sit up. And while he’s not one of the lead characters, he is by far and way its break-out star.

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“My character stole the show,” he says, with another satisfied punch. “Freddie Jones [his character] is a teddy bear with a bite, a bit of a belly, a couple of chins and kind eyes.” Was he surprised by the public’s reaction? “Rivals shows people I take my craft seriously. I’m happy that my character, a working-class one, is not the thick one. I’m the smartest, and the richest by far.”

He straightens himself up and recites his favourite line, the one he delivered to David Tennant’s irascible and narcissistic character, the rich, stately home-dwelling entrepreneur Tony. “I hate snobs, Tony,” he begins with menace, “and you’re the worst kind of all because you forgot where you came from.” He pauses and shakes his head. “To think I didn’t get an award for that. But wait till next season. I’m shooting it at the moment.” That explains the moustache he’s sporting today.

Considering how long he’s been in the public’s consciousness, wider recognition has been a long time coming, mostly because he’s been typecast in a variety of hard man roles. He started acting when he was a teen after he dropped out of school where he was bullied, enrolling in a drama school in North London and first appearing in Prime Suspect in 1993.

His break came with Human Traffic in 1999, a coming-of-age movie centred around the drug and nightclub culture of the time, which takes place over one weekend in Cardiff , followed by Mean Machine in 2001, and 2004’s hooligan-filled Football Factory. In each, he plays the trope we associate most with him as an actor: that of a mouthy, rough and delinquent east London boy. He further dialled down on the typecasting when he became a regular on our screens in EastEnders between 2013-2022 (having first turned it down in 2009), taking on the role of the Queen Vic’s landlord, Mick Carter. Then there were the Pinter years — or as he calls them, “my Harold years” — of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. The two immediately saw eye to eye, not least because Pinter originally came from Hackney. “He was fascinated by me, my rawness, how I swear a lot,” he says. “There was a bit of fear around Harold but I never feared the man.”

In 2000, Dyer starred in Pinter’s play Celebration at the Almeida, which then moved to Broadway. Overexcited by finding himself in the Big Apple, and possibly also terrified, he went on a drug binge the night before his stage debut. “I took crack,” he says. By the time it came for him to deliver his lines, he froze on stage, too high to remember his words, and suffered a panic attack. The cast stepped in and covered for him. How did Pinter react? “I could tell he was pissed o with me, but he put his arm around me and said: ‘You can’t fucking take drugs and walk on stage. Or you can and you will fucking be on your arse.’ I learned my lesson the hard way.”

There were clearly no hard feelings, because a year later Pinter cast him in No Man’s Land at the The National. The pair eventually fell out of touch, mostly because Dyer had gone off the rails. One morning in 2008, the night after he’d gone on a bender, he found himself in a petrol station buying cigarettes when he saw the newspaper headline ‘Pinter dead’. “This sent me on a spiral of madness, really,” he told Desert Island Discs. “The guilt of not being around him any more and just being lost: I was a bit of a lost soul, and angry at the world.”

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His drug-taking reached its zenith during his EastEnders years. “It took me a long time to realise I needed to calm the fuck down.” He knew he needed to go to rehab but not in England. “I didn’t want to go to the Priory [the rehab centre in Putney], so I went to a place in South Africa instead.”

He memorably opened his 2010 memoir, Straight Up, with the words: “I’ve always taken drugs and I probably always will, but there’s a difference between having the odd crafty bump up the snout as a reward for a job well done and letting it rule your life.” I ask him if that’s still the case — if he still takes drugs — but he prevaricates and offers up an answer of sorts. “I do like to enjoy myself,” he says. “I like a lovely wine. A Gavi. I do love a fucking strong beer. A nice cold Stella, always draught, or a Heineken. A nice crisp white wine. All this talk is making me….” As he also says in the book: “I think everything in moderation.”

The angst, if you can call it that, stems, as it invariably does, from his formative years. He was brought up on a council estate in Custom House, a tough area in east London, by a family of matriarchs. “There was danger in the air,” he says. As a little boy he remembers reaching out to hold his father’s hand as they crossed the street one day. He was told to never do that again. His father, who was a builder/decorator, walked out on the family when Danny was nine, after it was discovered he had a secret family. He credits his maternal grandfather, who he was particularly close to and who showed him affection, that it was OK to be a man and have a vulnerable side.

While he is now reconciled with his father, the one constant in his life is his wife, Joanne Mas (they married in 2016 and live in Debden, Essex), who shuns the public eye. He first met her when he was 13 and they have three children together: daughters Dani and Sunnie, and a son, Arty.

I used to stare at her a lot but she would never even acknowledge me,” he says, of his teenage self. “She was like the fittest bird in school and I was the scruffiest.” He stares up at the ceiling, thinking for a moment. “I’ve taken her on a mad old journey with the fame thing,” he continues. “She didn’t sign up for that, and, you know, with me going a bit crazy for a bit. She has to be very patient with me.”

For the moment, Dyer’s preparing himself for his daughter’s wedding, which is four days away. Does he know what he’s wearing? “A lovely double-breasted navy blue suit from Savile Row,” he says, as if he’s describing his favourite curry. “The only problem is that in all the wedding pictures there will be me there with a fucking moustache.”

Does he at least approve of who she’s marrying? “I love the person she’s marrying so much. He plays for West Ham [forward Jarrod Bowen]. I think I’m the luckiest father of the bride in the history of any father of the bride. I’m more in love with her fella than she is. He’s marrying the wrong Dani Dyer.”

Speaking of children: what does he make of all the current nepo-baby noise? Does he try to protect them from it? “It’s so crazy,” he says. “It’s not frowned upon in the military, or with doctors and dentists, only in the arts. I will open as many doors as I possibly can for my children. Why wouldn’t I? I want to give them a fucking amazing life. I’ve always told them: if you’ve got a bit of talent [his daughter Sunnie is an actress too], and you’re very kind, you’ll go a long way. Because you fi nd that a lot of people in this industry are really talented, but they’re fucking cunts. They’ve got good PR people around them so no one’s aware of it, or the public aren’t aware of it, but everyone in the industry knows.”

So what’s next for Danny Dyer? “I’d love to play a gay aristocrat,” he says, improbably. “No, really I would. They’ll just need to give my moustache a bit more of a handlebar.” For the moment he’s busy promoting his turn in Nick Love’s Marching Powder, a movie about cocaine addiction.

“You know, I’ve now got enough money to live on and travel,” he continues. “And by the time I’m 55, and my youngest son will be 19, I’ll be at an age where me and my missus wanna go and explore and fuck off and then maybe come back and I’ll do a little play. I mean, look at Ray Winstone. He’s one of my idols. He’s fucked off to Sicily. He lives there. He grows olives.”

His PA, sitting nearby, announces our time is up. Dyer immediately stands and positions his man bag across his body. “Right,” he announces, “let’s go bang this fucker out.” He gives me a hug and marches o to where the glam team awaits him. As I walk away I can see one of the crew holding a pint of beer. “This is for Danny,” he says. Of course it is.

This feature was taken from our Summer 2025 issue. Read more about it here.

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