Danny Dyer: East End Boy

by Joe Allan

  It was a long way down for Danny, but it is fair to say he only had himself to blame for much of what happened to his career over the next few years, given the choices he made.

  He had acquired an American agent following his work on Severance. Everyone around him assumed Straightheads would help open a few doors for him internationally, and a trip to America was planned to test the waters for a possible move into bigger Hollywood movies or US television work. He told the Female First website, ‘If you go to America, you will end up one of two things – either f*****g rich or a nervous wreck – but you won’t know unless you go.’ In the end, the trip to the US turned out to be largely fruitless. Both his agent and his management team had been confident and enthusiastic about the trip – Danny even told Hunger TV at the time, ‘I’ve definitely got to go out there and have a crack’, but in truth, his heart wasn’t in it. It was another three weeks away from Joanne and his family, and he felt completely at odds with the lifestyle and the political game one is expected to play to survive in the industry over there. Danny told Total Film magazine that he’d met with producers in Los Angeles to talk about a role in Wanted, the graphic novel turned action movie that eventually starred Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy. He revealed, ‘The meeting was in a restaurant and I felt it was all about the food I was ordering, the conversation we had, instead of just giving me the script and letting me read.’ He continued, ‘I felt vulnerable. I struggled with the fakeness’, admitting, ‘My American agent was ringing me and I wouldn’t get back to him. He started to get a bit f****d off with it.’ While he may have squandered a potentially life-changing opportunity, it seems Danny wasn’t really ready to make such a transition, and certainly not without Joanne and his family.

  This attempt at career progression was no doubt further scuppered by Danny’s inability to completely embrace different accents in his roles, something that contributed to his perceived dependence on playing different aspects of his own personality. Danny was philosophical about it, telling LoveFilm.com, ‘So I have a cockney accent, it’s not all about accents; just because you can do accents, it doesn’t make you a chameleon.’

  Danny discussed his perceived limitations, confiding in the Sick Chirpse website, ‘I would be the first to admit that I play myself in movies ... that’s what I do. I pick out the best parts of my own character,’ adding, ‘Nobody can play me better than me.’ While it’s true Danny has an uncanny ability to project elements of his own personality onto the screen, he is doing himself a massive disservice by branding one of his greatest assets a flaw and perpetrating a crippling misconception that sees him repeatedly underestimated as an actor, consistently labelled as someone with no real desire to challenge himself. On screen, Danny has a quality that a lot of the great actors from Hollywood’s golden era possessed and one which allowed them to project their own persona onto virtually any character. Danny recognizes this ability, saying, ‘I like to [paint] myself as an old school movie star because that’s what they used to do years ago.’

  Casting any film or television project is extremely difficult. Casting agents, like everyone else in the industry, are keen to stick to a formula that works and hire people they already know can deliver. Danny had helped create a niche for himself, but it would soon become a trap.

  He had managed to salvage some of his reputation as a reliable and hard-working actor from his earlier drug and drink-dependent days. His public profile was now at an all-time high, but unfortunately the accompanying media persona, created in the tabloids and nurtured by Danny himself, didn’t help him win any new friends in the industry. Yet again, Danny was finding it hard to drum up interest from producers and directors, failing to attract the kind of jobs he found interesting and, perhaps more importantly, also paid a reasonable wage.

  During this period, a recommendation from Gillian Anderson meant Danny got the chance to work alongside one of his all-time acting heroes, Ray Winstone. Playing his son in a made-for-television drama called All in the Game, Danny relished the chance to go up against his idol. Winstone was not quick to massage the ego of any actor he was working alongside, but he and Danny gelled well together, and the latter recounted in his autobiography, ‘[We] hit it off immediately, like we’d known each other for years’. He told Hunger TV, ‘He is still brilliant ... He said to me, “Cor, you’re a blinding little actor.” I wanted to sob my heart out.’ With the solid working and personal relationships he enjoyed with both Winstone and Nick Love, it must have been doubly crushing for Danny to discover he wasn’t even in the running for a role in Love’s The Sweeney a few years later.

  He had accepted bit parts on various television dramas, but nothing challenged him the way Nick Love’s projects had. The nearest he would come to such a test was a small role in Noel Clarke’s acclaimed film Adulthood, but even this memorable turn wasn’t enough to revitalize his diminished status and re-establish him as a leading man in mainstream movies.

  In truth, Danny was not working nearly as much as he would have liked and there would be a particularly quiet couple of years for him professionally following Straightheads, but thankfully, he had plenty to keep him busy at home.

  April 2007 had seen the birth of Danny’s second child, another daughter, named Sunnie, and, with a growing family, Danny was more than happy to help Joanne at home, content to be more of a presence during the first few months of Sunnie’s life than he had been for Dani.

  Danny and Joanne had strengthened and stabilized as a couple in the years following their separation and subsequent reconciliation, but Sunnie’s birth had put extra strain on their young family. Despite earning a decent enough amount of money over the previous few years, Danny was not living an extravagant lifestyle. He had bought himself a couple of flash cars (a Porsche and a Mercedes A-Class), and Joanne and the girls wanted for nothing, but he had been reluctant to leave the small house he and Joanne still shared near the estate where they’d grown up. With only two bedrooms, he found himself sleeping on the couch downstairs, while Joanne and the baby slept in their room and Dani, now fast approaching her teens, needed the other bedroom to herself. The cramped living conditions certainly didn’t improve the situation between Danny and Joanne: they were arguing a lot and the mood in the Dyer household was nearly always tense.

  With very few interesting TV or film jobs coming his way, and accepting that the situation could not carry on forever, Danny agreed to star in another Pinter role, in a revival of his 1964 play, The Homecoming, which was set to run for the first few months of 2008. Luckily for Danny, he was able to channel all the stress and frustration he was feeling about his career and home life into the part, and he delivered another solid and praiseworthy performance. While the run was successful and well reviewed, it was the same old story of regular work, but minimal pay.

  Towards the end of the Homecoming run, Danny and Joanne were asked to appear on an episode of the ITV quiz show All Star Mr & Mrs. While it wasn’t something Danny was particularly interested in doing, it raised money for charity and Joanne was keen to be involved. Interviewed on Loose Women some time afterwards, he admitted, ‘I came unstuck’, explaining, ‘[It’s] not a good idea to test your relationship live on telly . . . it was a wrong move . . . we came last’. Any suggestion of domestic bliss apparent during the recording of the show and any points Danny may have received from Joanne for doing it were quickly forgotten when a few days later, Danny agreed to join Lily Allen as a guest on her BBC Three chat show, Lily Allen and Friends. Filmed immediately after the play’s run had ended that year, Danny was in the mood to celebrate, and a night on the town with his old friend Lily seemed to fit the bill.

  Danny had known Lily Allen from her early teens through her father, Keith, with whom he starred alongside in Pinter’s Celebration almost a decade before, and over the years they had become good friends. Their argumentative natures, relationships with alcohol and drugs and propensity for faux pas in the press made them perfect playmates.

  Lily Allen and
Friends was reaching the end of its first series and it seemed only natural that she would invite Danny onto the last episode as a special guest, and soon after recording finished, the pair headed out to celebrate. Unfortunately for Danny, things escalated and the Sun reported he ended up on the end of Joanne’s wrath, writing ‘[Danny has] been booted out by his missus after going on a wild bender’, while they quoted a ‘friend’, who confirmed the story: ‘Joanne’s livid ... She couldn’t get hold of him for three whole days after he filmed Lily’s show. She knows he was with Lily and drag queen Jodie Harsh.’ It’s highly unlikely Danny had any sort of untoward relationship with Lily – she was just a good friend – but, nonetheless, he spent a short while sleeping back at his mother’s house with the tabloids reporting he had cheated on Joanne yet again. He would be in his partner’s bad graces for a while, admitting to the Digital Spy website, ‘I got caught out doing something I shouldn’t have done. I hate myself for what I did and for being tempted by forbidden fruit.’ Joanne accepted Danny was sorry and soon relented, letting him back into the family home. Perhaps this was the final bargaining chip Joanne needed to make her case about the family’s living arrangements.

  Joanne was adamant the family needed to move into a bigger house and Danny, realizing he had to finally accept the inevitable and eager to keep the peace at home, reluctantly agreed to move.

  Despite having worked consistently for years, Danny would need to get a mortgage like everybody else. Bizarrely, this turned out to be harder than he thought and the subsequent struggles to raise the funds forced him to finally get his financial affairs in order. Danny got his first credit card – although it’s hard to believe, considering his lifestyle, he’d never found any use for one in the past – and started to think a bit more seriously about his future and the future of his family.

  Danny’s continued determination to work might be explained by his determination to prove something to Joanne and to give his children a better start in life than he had growing up. Danny’s unwavering commitment to his family is possibly best demonstrated by the fact he decided it would be best to send his eldest daughter, Dani, to a private school rather than their local comprehensive, which he felt was not the best place for his daughter to receive her education. While it may seem at odds with a man so fiercely proud of his working-class roots, who frequently defends his hometown and champions London’s East End, it shows he is also being realistic about the shortcomings of the area. Although money was never his motivation for working, for the first time in his career, Danny was forced to focus solely on just that: the figure on offer, rather than the quality of the work.

  With this in mind and with a heavy heart, Danny accepted Bravo’s offer to front another reality documentary series in 2008 – this time focusing on a motley selection of infamous hard men, gangsters and organized crime bosses. It was this series, entitled Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men, and its follow-up, Deadliest Men 2: Living Dangerously, which would, on the face of it, bring about the end of Danny’s working relationship with Nick Love and go a long way towards irreparably destroying Danny’s reputation as a serious actor. While the two documentaries might not have harmed the image his fans had of him, in certain circles these shows reinforced the feeling that Danny had become a parody of himself, trapped in a clichéd hard-man persona of his own making. He became a bit of a laughing stock, his presenting work damaging his credibility and turning some members of the film-making community off him.

  Later, an attempt at a more ‘serious’ subject – visitors from outer space and alien abductions – in a 2010 BBC3 documentary entitled I Believe in UFOs only made Danny even more of a target for ridicule. To this day, he is philosophical about the choices he has been forced to make during certain periods of his career, and stresses the balance between retaining his credibility and providing for his family is a difficult one to achieve. He told Hunger TV in 2010, ‘I had to go off the track and make these mad documentaries about hooligans and deadliest men, and I got a bad reputation from that. When I watch some of the shows back, I cringe.’ But he was adamant he had little choice: ‘It would have been great to be able to stick to acting, but unfortunately the reality is that these are the gigs that got me the house and helped me put my kids through private school.’

  Years later, Danny was still haunted by questions about the work he’d done on the Deadliest Men documentaries. Discussing this period with Total Film in 2013, he clearly resents having to justify his decision to keep working when his chosen profession is famous for its long periods of unemployment: ‘I despised it ... But I was living on a council estate still. They offered me so much money I couldn’t believe it. Six figures for six weeks’ work ... I’ve got kids. It got us a house.’ Danny cites one of his acting heroes as a good precedent. ‘Look at Michael Caine. Back in the eighties he was known for making terrible films, and now he’s been knighted off.’ He finished jokingly, ‘You can only hope . . . ’ While Sir Danny Dyer might still be a long way off, there’s no denying he makes a fair point. Caine himself, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, was reported in the Telegraph to have wholeheartedly embraced some of the undeniable stinkers on his CV. He said of 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge (the third, and last sequel to Spielberg’s original), ‘I have never seen it. By all accounts it is terrible.’ He added wryly, ‘However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.’

  It seemed Danny would need a thick skin in this period of his working life, and his desire to survive forced him to grow one very quickly. There is no doubt he had all but lost the credibility he’d garnered through his work with Pinter and his film collaborations with Nick Love, owing in large part to the television documentaries that had now made him the butt of endless jokes and comedy parodies. Add to this his good-natured willingness to do favours for people in the industry, and he had disastrously diluted the quality of work he was being offered. Although his drive to keep working and provide for his growing family is undeniably commendable, it had led him to make some questionable choices and saw him attached to too many low-budget projects unworthy of his talents.

  While Danny saw many of his contemporaries make the move to Hollywood and flourish there, he was resigned to stay at home and become the poster boy for a particular brand of UK-made, independent movie.

  One such contemporary who serves as a case in point is Jason Statham. Statham managed to make the transition from British films, such as Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, to starring roles in Hollywood franchises like The Expendables with very little backlash. Like Danny, he had both chosen a lucrative niche for himself and featured in more than his fair share of mediocre action movies, but nevertheless maintains an untarnished reputation as a movie star and does not suffer the bad press Danny does. The key difference is Statham’s keen protection of his private affairs and unwillingness to do interviews, limiting any possible public embarrassments and allowing the focus to be solely on his work. Danny realizes he might just be his own worst enemy in this respect, revealing to the Guardian, ‘There are some actors out there that are brilliant at just acting and not giving interviews, mainly because they are boring as s**t and they’ve got absolutely nothing to talk about ... But if there’s one thing I regret about my career it’s that I didn’t let my acting do the talking.’

  Danny’s constant presence across the tabloid gossip pages and his interviews on daytime TV shows such as Loose Women, Lorraine and This Morning were seen as good marketing opportunities, but only succeeded in cheapening the Danny Dyer brand. Fighting his natural instinct to swear or say something slightly risqué, Danny would end up tongue-tied, desperately trying to stay on the right side of ‘family viewing’. While his ‘take me or leave me’ approach and unwillingness to censor himself is a refreshing change from the over-rehearsed responses of many in the public eye, Danny is often too candid about his opinions and his personal life and admitted to Total Film, ‘Maybe it’s time I pipe down for a little bit. I’ve lost out on lots of
jobs because of my mouth.’

  As if to prove this point, and acting as a counter-balance to the poor quality films and television documentaries he had made, Danny was continually encouraged to diversify and establish himself as more of a mainstream actor. He told the Female First website, ‘I have started getting knocked by the critics and I’m not used to that, I’m used to people loving me and what I’ve done. They are saying that I’m doing a lot of the same stuff. I know it’s just critics but I know that I haven’t proved myself as an actor. I have maybe shown twenty per cent of what I can do.’ Everyone working closely with Danny shared this view, supporting his belief that he had the talent to shine outside of the restrictive market in which he found himself. No doubt as an attempt to claw back some of his credibility and hard-earned self-respect, Danny’s agents pushed him to audition for more period dramas and character roles, encouraging him to accept a greater number of interesting supporting roles rather than a few more lucrative, but ultimately less satisfying, leading parts.

  Danny had tentatively expressed an interest in taking a role in a West End musical. Oliver! was a particular favourite of his from childhood, and he would audition for a part in Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of the musical, which was set to open at The Palladium in London in January 2009.

  Following the success of the BBC reality talent show How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? in finding a leading lady for the revival of The Sound of Music, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Cameron Mackintosh were going down the same route to find a suitable actress to play the part of Nancy and revive Oliver! in London’s West End. The other roles were being filled behind the scenes and Danny received a call saying the producers were interested in having him audition for the role of Bill Sikes. Danny was far from being a confident singer, but was relieved to see the Sikes role only required him to sing one solo song.