Danny Dyer: East End Boy

by Joe Allan

  Joanne needn’t have worried about Danny going on another long shoot abroad: he was in a particularly good place as far as drink and drugs were concerned, and while he was never going to be a 100 per cent teetotal or completely drug-free, he had really cleaned up his act and seemed to have finally learned his lesson. Even without a set visit from Joanne or his family, Danny remained totally focused on the work during the Severance shoot, acting the consummate professional.

  Danny admired Smith’s directing style, which mirrored the energy and enthusiasm of Nick Love, but without any of the latter’s aggressive tendencies. The atmosphere on set was intense: there was a lot to be done in a relatively short time, but this did not lessen the banter between cast and crew, which remained light-hearted, and Danny was relishing the opportunity to show off some of his underused comedic talents. In an on-set interview, later used as part of the DVD bonus material, Danny said he was disappointed he’d had to rein in his bad language in order to make sure the film secured a 15 certificate, joking, ‘It cuts my range down a little bit.’

  It was a long and complicated shoot, however. Multiple practical special-effects sequences meant lots of waiting around between takes, and the horrific wounds needed for a horror movie required most of the cast to spend hours in the make-up chair.

  Danny was again struggling to cope with being away from Joanne and Dani for an extended period of time, and after a month in the Hungarian wilderness, the whole crew moved to a new base camp on the Isle of Man. Here, they would spend the rest of the production capturing exterior shots and filming all the interiors on a specially built set. Hungary had felt a long way away from his family and Danny recalled on the film’s DVD extras, ‘I couldn’t wait to leave it. I didn’t think I’d ever, ever find myself saying I cannot wait to get to the Isle of Man, but I did say that a few times.’ Still isolated from Joanne on the new location, some of his frustration came to a head during a publicity interview for the film. Danny had complained he had found the Isle of Man depressing and unintentionally insulted the islanders. The fallout caused major problems for Danny and his agent, who was quick to remind him the Isle of Man was now a hub for film-makers and he might just find himself working there again in the future – facing crowds of angry Manx. Danny apologized in the press, but it wouldn’t be the last time he’d speak before thinking things through.

  The rest of the shoot was fairly uneventful and it turned out to be another extremely pleasurable experience for Danny. Speaking in commentary for the DVD, he said, ‘I’m so glad it’s in the can . . . [I] absolutely enjoyed every second of it, to be honest. It’s been tough, it’s been draining, but in the right way . . . I’m very excited about what it’s going to look like.’

  Owing more than a small debt to similarly unique twists on the horror genre, such as Eli Roth’s Hostel, released the year before, Severance managed to successfully bridge the gap between horror and comedy, and found a decent audience in the UK on its release in August 2006, eventually becoming a sizeable hit on DVD. The film even picked up several positive reviews in the US, including from Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, who wrote, ‘The jolts are juicy and so are the jokes . . . Director and co-writer Christopher Smith, mischievously blending The Office with Friday the 13th, keeps things fierce and funny.’

  Thanks to the success of his recent output, Danny was now considerably more famous, and his brand as a straight-talking everyman had put him on the radar of countless film and television producers, as well as commercial companies keen on employing his cross-market potential. He and Tamer Hassan became ambassadors for sportswear maker Fila after the brand’s heavy exposure in The Business and Danny would notoriously lend his name to a magazine column in the mens’ magazine, Zoo. So when he was approached by the Bravo TV network in 2006 to front a series of documentaries they were planning to make under the banner The Real Football Factories, it made perfect sense. Having Danny’s name attached to the show would mean his ever-growing fan base – and Bravo’s target audience – would be more likely to tune in. The money on offer was not to be sniffed at and Danny, despite having no experience in presenting, jumped at the chance.

  He found the whole experience fairly soul-destroying, telling Sothcott and Mullinger in their book, ‘I watch some of those documentaries and I cringe a bit.’ He added that the general public overestimate the financial rewards that go along with making films, saying, ‘Ultimately, I couldn’t turn the money down. It wasn’t a journalistic thing – I never wanted to be a presenter . . . If I could change things, I probably would.’ Considering what came later, and further ill-informed involvements presenting documentaries, it is no surprise.

  The series saw Danny meet groups of football hooligans from different areas of the country and even followed the English fans as they travelled abroad to overseas tournaments. It was car-crash television in a sense, but it didn’t hurt Danny’s reputation among his core fans – they lapped it up. However, it seemed to some in the film and television industry that Danny was mimicking his on-screen characters in real life, which unfortunately lessened his credibility in their eyes, but worse than that, it diverted attention from the strength of his recent performances and jeopardized his long-held ambitions to be taken seriously as an actor.

  Danny would later go on to make a couple of similarly themed series for Bravo in 2008 and 2009 respectively, Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men and Deadliest Men 2: Living Dangerously, which only compounded people’s opinions of him.

  Luckily, Danny’s next project in 2006 would see him back in his comfort zone in the skilful hands of Nick Love, someone who understood what Danny was capable of and was willing to give him the chance to show it. While Outlaw would see him returning to work with his favourite director, it wouldn’t all be plain sailing and the experience was nowhere near as harmonious as their previous collaborations.

  Danny goes to great lengths to stress that, despite what people might think, he has never purposely gone out of his way to stir up controversy. On the other hand, he does admit that he would never back away from it if it does come his way. In an interview in the Independent, in what might seem like a bit of an understatement, Danny acknowledged that some of the films he’d starred in have caused argument, stating, ‘I love being part of a controversy, because it leads to debate. It gets people to think about things. I would hate the idea of making a film and people saying, “Oh, it’s alright.” I’d rather it upset a few people.’

  From the outset, it was obvious that Outlaw would create a stir, with it seeming to condone vigilante justice. In the end, it was more a maelstrom than merely a stir, as the debate about the film got out of hand.

  A bone of contention for Danny was the fact Love had decided to drop virtually all of his regular actors in favour of hiring some bigger names – out went Tamer Hassan and Roland Manookian, and in came Sean Bean and Bob Hoskins. Danny was approached to play a relatively small part, a deranged and racist nail bomber, and he was inclined to accept, seeing the character as a good chance to test himself and shine in a secondary role. He was still keen to stay on the good side of Hassan and the rest of his erstwhile Nick Love acting family, and thought taking a smaller part might not be seen as such an act of betrayal by them. However, Love changed his mind and asked Danny to take on a larger role, as the story’s more straightforward, relatable everyman character, with his old part going to Sean Harris.

  Outlaw is, on the face of it, a simple vigilante thriller that aims to explore what happens when an individual senses no one is listening and feels they have to take the law into their own hands. Sean Bean’s character is a returning soldier who finds his hometown of London becoming more of a war zone than the Afghan battlefield he has just left behind, riddled with crime and violence. He recruits a band of similarly minded men and starts his own army, vowing to deliver his own brand of law enforcement and justice.

  On the whole, the filming went without a hitch. Danny was excited to meet one of his idols – the star of one of his favou
rite movies, The Long Good Friday – and seeing Bob Hoskins at work, on one of his last movies before his illness-induced retirement, was a thrill. Unfortunately, Danny thought the old cliché about ‘never meeting your idols’ was about to come true. Initially, he found Hoskins difficult to talk to and was disappointed when the actor seemed to have no interest in football – England were valiantly battling their way through the World Cup at the time – and he worried Hoskins was struggling to fully accept the harsher elements of the script. He needn’t have been concerned, though, as when Hoskins finally hit his stride, Danny was suitably impressed with the great man’s work and was won over all over again.

  In its transition to the big screen, the film had lost some of the more interesting and unique elements contained in the original script and there is a real sense that Love had lost his way during the editing process. In Sothcott and Mullinger’s book, Danny explains, ‘Nick made changes and f****d around with Outlaw . . . I don’t think the final product was the film that he had wanted to make.’ Love had lost his bullishness and unquestioning faith in his own abilities and the film would suffer as a consequence of his own second-guessing. On its release in March 2007, Empire praised the director’s previous body of work before slating Outlaw in a blistering one-star review: ‘Love portrays violent vigilantism as heroism . . . It’s a volatile set-up with interesting questions to answer, but quickly descends into a sickening sludge of childish politics, brutality and creative swearing.’ Similarly, the Guardian defended Love as a director, saying, ‘Nick Love is still a real film-maker’, before acknowledging, ‘Outlaw is crude and dull and just horrible’.

  Much of the controversy ignited by the film’s violent – and often, senseless – content on its initial release had just about died down when the film came out on DVD. Unfortunately for Danny, his DVD commentary, recorded with Love, was picked up by the newspapers. An edited ‘highlights’ video went viral on YouTube and the pair’s most outlandish remarks, taken completely out of context, seemed ill judged. Danny’s only defence was the fact that DVD commentaries are an odd thing to have to do, and he and Love had used the opportunity to have a laugh and say the most obscure things they could think of. The result was a prolonged barrage of swearing and banter that had little or nothing to do with the film. The fallout from this would see Danny’s relationship with Love begin to deteriorate, the final nail in the coffin being Love’s response to Danny’s Real Football Factories and Deadliest Men documentary series.

  The Real Football Factories began airing during the filming of Outlaw in 2006 and it is unclear whether Love even knew they existed when he hired Danny for the film. What was clear was his disapproval, as he believed Danny was cheapening himself by doing them. Love, in a 2009 interview with Loaded magazine, described the circumstances surrounding Danny’s absence from his next film, The Firm, by saying, ‘No way. There was never a chance; I said to him there was no way’. He explained, ‘there has been a backlash against Danny. The tide has turned . . . Danny’s become bigger now because of the not-so-good stuff he’s done. The telly, the reality stuff. Danny knows this, I’ve told him.’

  Danny was obviously upset by this, but also recognized that there was some truth in Love’s comments. Danny’s only real objection to them was why the director’s personal opinion of him should so dramatically affect their working relationship. In truth, he was happy to let The Firm pass him by – it was another football hooligan film and he wanted to avoid revisiting similar roles to avoid people perceiving him as one kind of character. But in 2009, when Love was first hired to make a film adaptation of seventies cop show The Sweeney, Danny was convinced he would have been perfect to star alongside Ray Winstone in a part that eventually went to the singer Plan B. He was upset to find his relationship with Love had faded so completely and it seems he was never really considered for the part.

  At this point, in 2007, Danny had always been adamant money was never his main motivation for working, but ‘mates’ rates’ projects for Love and low-salary stage work was not going to keep Danny and his family afloat – he just wished critics, and disappointingly in this instance, Nick Love, could understand this. In The Films of Danny Dyer, he admits, ‘In a way [taking easy jobs] was a sell-out. I gave away “me”. Tom Hardy isn’t going to do that. Fassbender isn’t going to do that. I gave “me” away and I think I became a bit of a parody in some people’s eyes.’

  It was this selling of his personal brand, the inevitable controversies that sprang up around his films, as well as the countless interview gaffs Danny was prone to make, which increasingly drew focus away from his work. His next project would only add to the problem. Straightheads, despite featuring a very strong performance from Danny, would be one of his last films to date to receive a mainstream cinema release and it would kick-start a seemingly unstoppable decline in the quality of roles Danny would be offered over the next five or six years.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JUST FOR THE MONEY

  S traightheads came to Danny at a time when his relationship with Nick Love appeared to be floundering and his chances of working with a similarly driven and creative director seemed unlikely. He sums up his position bluntly and concisely in the film’s commentary, saying, ‘I’m not in the position to pick and choose my roles, so whatever comes in front of me, I do it.’

  While this approach didn’t always have a positive outcome, with Straightheads, and in the capable hands of writer and director Dan Reed, Danny had landed on his feet.

  Although Straightheads was his first attempt at writing and directing a feature film, Reed was something of a veteran, having fifteen years’ experience as a documentary film-maker under his belt. He had spent many years studying conflict in various volatile and politically unsettled places around the world, and Straightheads was viewed as an exploration of what might happen if that level of violence were to enter our supposedly safe and civilized society.

  Gillian Anderson was set to play Alice, a successful, independent businesswoman who becomes involved in a crazed revenge plot after she is sexually assaulted by a group of men who find her stranded in isolated woodland after a car accident. Anderson had found worldwide fame as Agent Dana Scully in the long-running science fiction series, The X-Files. Although the show had also spawned a couple of movies, Anderson had so far failed to establish herself as a bankable film actress, and this was her next attempt at big-screen success.

  She had already been cast when Danny was asked to audition for the role of Adam, a tradesman working on Alice’s home, who becomes her lover and accomplice in her pursuit of justice through violence. The scenes Danny was sent for his first meeting with Anderson and his director, Reed, were surprisingly intimate, and Danny joked in an interview for the DVD, ‘I was quite looking forward to this audition, for once’. He explained the method in a more direct approach they decided to take: ‘Apparently, the other actors they saw were a bit lost and didn’t really take control and that’s what they wanted to see from me, for me to take control of the scene and command it a bit . . . they liked that in me. They liked that I was game and was up for it.’

  Danny was aware that their acting styles couldn’t be more different, but he relished the challenge of going toe-to-toe with an incredibly talented and fearless actress of Anderson’s stature. Reed also saw the benefits, saying, ‘It’s a tremendous challenge for Danny, but it gives him something very clear to play with and lean on.’

  Reed saw an unmistakable chemistry between his two actors in their initial screen-test, which was just as well, because the couple shared a lot of intimate and sexual scenes in the script. Although he accepted the offer of the role, Danny was torn by the amount of sexual content, happy that it was the Gillian Anderson, someone he had quite a crush on, but conscious Joanne was never particularly happy when Danny had this kind of scene in a film. He said during an on-set interview, ‘It’s really weird to have a licence to kiss somebody else, to be naughty with somebody else’. He then joked, ‘I know my old w
oman’s not very happy at the moment, she’s got the hump ... she don’t mind spending my dough, so she’s got to understand how I earn it.’

  It is another revelatory performance from Danny, playing slightly against type as someone out of his depth, naive and unsure of himself, but who digs deep to show courage and determination in some extremely violent situations. Anderson praised Danny’s ability to capture the two sides of the character, believing he played Adam as ‘observant and voyeuristic . . . shy, yet definitely able to have a good time and get what he wants’. She finished, ‘He’s playing that innocence and lost child [thing] very well.’ Dan Reed was even more forthcoming with his praise for Danny, ‘He’s a very confident guy in his own right, he’s completely unafraid; he’s interested in his own internal logic of his own character. He’s having tremendous fun.’ He illustrated perfectly where Danny’s level was at that particular time: ‘I’ve seen [Danny] in a number of films and I think he is evolving as an actor. He’s moving on tremendously, more focused, more concentrated, very disciplined, very constant . . . I think he’s going to go far and we’ve caught him at the right point.’

  Unfortunately, when it was released in 2007, the film failed to find much of an audience in UK or US cinemas, where it was renamed Closure. Ending the film with Adam’s desperate acts of violent retribution was perhaps a mistake, and an earlier scene, where Alice drives off with the daughter of the man who attacked her, may have been a more suitable last shot. Whatever the reason for the choice, it would be a bitter blow for everyone involved – but probably most damaging for Danny.

  Straightheads was another turning point in Danny’s career. Its relative failure at the UK box office saw him slip further from the mainstream, pushing him deeper into the murkier world of independent film-making, private financing, straight-to-DVD features and micro-budget genre features. Any fantasy held by the general public about film-making being a world filled with glamour and huge financial rewards would be quickly shattered if they saw the reality of working in low-budget movies.