Danny Dyer: East End Boy

by Joe Allan

  He was forced to break cover to attend the premiere of his next film, Just for the Record, which was due to take place the same day the Zoo story broke. By merely showing up, Danny fed the media frenzy, and the press found any excuse to keep the story running. The film’s opening box office was reported to be a minuscule figure, although it only received a limited cinema release in order both to publicize the DVD launch a few days later and to ensure it was eligible for video on demand. This had become common practice for the area of film-making in which Danny was now almost exclusively working. Unfortunately for him, the press became increasingly keen to report these ridiculously low box-office figures, neglecting to mention the real reasons for their poor performance.

  The seemingly endless cycle of churning out budget features continued, and the latter part of 2010 saw the release of The Last Seven – a muddled supernatural thriller that was little more than a 28 Days Later mimic, featuring Danny in a non-speaking role as the Angel of Death. This was followed by a string of low-budget sci-fi and horror films that included Dead Cert, Devil’s Playground and The Basement. It is this last film that is seen by many as the nadir of Danny’s career, so bad that he didn’t even show up for the film’s London premiere, instead drinking in a nearby pub with the film’s producer.

  Danny’s professional life was at an all-time low. Stuart Heritage contributed a piece to the Guardian stating that, ‘Danny Dyer has become the byword for low-budget, no-quality, Brit-trash cinema,’ before adding, ‘But beneath the cockney swagger there’s a decent actor struggling to get out.’ Despite the odd critic noticing there was more to Danny than just an easy target for lazy journalism, for the first time in years, Danny was beginning to lose faith in his own abilities. He told Sothcott and Mullinger in The Films of Danny Dyer, ‘I wasn’t in the most confident of places and in my mind I had started doubting myself ... I started to think that I was a bit of a joke to people.’ He finished, ‘I was getting just, hate, hate, hate and I wasn’t used to it.’

  During this period of lamentable releases, a long-running battle of words with film critic Mark Kermode began, prompted by Kermode’s continually scathing approach to Danny’s work. While Danny has said he doesn’t mind people having a little laugh at his expense, he felt Kermode’s attacks were somehow more personal. The actor told Empire magazine, ‘I know he’s got to earn a crust of bread just like everyone else does, but he’s got a serious f*****g problem with me.’ In another interview with the Independent, Danny said, ‘[Kermode] thinks I’m the most ridiculous human being on this planet and that I shouldn’t be an actor . . . I’m all up for the banter, but this is about feeding my kids at the end of the day.’ He concluded in his autobiography that the criticism was more related to class and education than his talent. ‘Clearly, he thinks I talk funny . . . Well, that’s how cockneys talk. Posh people think they’re so superior to the working class.’ While many assume every actor is immune to criticism, Danny admitted in the same interview with the Independent, ‘Of course it upsets me . . . Kermode thinks I’m some two-bob actor who does two-bob films for no money, who walks about with a swagger. When actually I’m a serious f*****g actor.’ He believes Kermode is not alone in his underestimation and misunderstanding of him, admitting, ‘I think I’m to blame for that’ – a reference, presumably, to the lack of quality in his recent output.

  Danny was making good money, but in real terms his film career had become little more than a treadmill of substandard material. When he did enjoy making a certain film or felt he had given a decent performance, critics were unduly savage. Even his status as a sure thing in the straight-to-DVD market was beginning to slide, as distribution company Revolver slipped into financial meltdown. After a particularly busy couple of years, DVD trade paper Screen International wrote, ‘Audiences may well be suffering from Danny Dyer fatigue after a surfeit of similar low-life wallows featuring this actor.’

  It was perhaps this ‘fatigue’ that caused a couple of Danny’s better films, 2011’s Age of Heroes and 2012’s Deviation, to fail in such spectacular fashion.

  Age of Heroes saw Danny teamed with his old Outlaw co-star Sean Bean in a story based on an incident from the life of Bond author, Ian Fleming. It was a throwback to the all-action films of the 1970s, paying homage to the likes of The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. A bigger budget and exotic locations – the film was shot in the Norwegian mountains – saw the film elevated above some of Danny’s recent work, but the film failed to stop the rot as far as Danny’s reputation was concerned. Danny told Sothcott and Mullinger, ‘What a great film! I knew that it was a film my dad would have liked . . . but it didn’t do the business it should have done and again I don’t know why,’ conceding, somewhat pessimistically, ‘It’s just the f*****g spiral . . .’ The film was a sizeable hit on DVD, shifting a remarkable 23,000 copies in its first week, but this success was not reported in the mainstream press and few were willing to give Danny the break he needed to kick-start a much-needed career revival.

  It was a similar story for Deviation. Conceived as a low-budget film, it saw Danny play a psychopath who terrorizes a lone woman over the course of one night in London. Danny was excited by the script, telling the Female First website, ‘I just thought that it was really brave film-making to just rely on two actors to keep the story going and keep it interesting with no gimmicks, there are no set pieces or stunts; it would make a really a good play.’ Working with tiny, hand-held digital cameras during a series of gruelling night shoots, it was an intense but enjoyable experience. ‘I just loved the idea of it because it is such a rare thing. I also wanted to get back to basics and get back to acting really, because it’s what I love to do.’

  On its completion, the film became the victim of distribution company Revolver’s financial difficulties and was released during the same period as a mass exodus of most of its key personnel. This, along with the harm already done to Danny’s reputation by his recent output and run-ins with the press, meant the film didn’t have a chance. A particularly extreme review was written by Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail. After a thorough assassination of much of Danny’s work, he turned on the actor himself, asking, ‘What’s the explanation for Mr Dyer’s consistently degrading roles, which serve only to show up his bewildering lack of talent?’ The critic continued, ‘[He is] a very bad actor, with zero sense of social responsibility. Mr Dyer is very much a villain of our times. It’s an illuminating comment on modern British film that he keeps being cast as a leading man.’ Not even the most deluded optimist could spin that as ‘any publicity is good publicity’, and it sums up the opinion of Danny and his work in much of the British press at the time. It was the final nail in Deviation’s coffin, and subsequently, the film disappeared without trace.

  Freerunner, again featuring Tamer Hassan, gave Danny his first chance to shoot in America. He admitted he took the job mostly for the experience of working in the States and the chance to take the family on a holiday while they were there. The film was nothing short of a disaster, with budget cuts during production altering virtually everything that had piqued Danny’s interest in the script in the first place.

  Danny was floundering. With money less of an issue after so much regular work, he started to take long periods off between jobs, and he confided to Female First, ‘I sort of took a year out because I got a little lost and I was thinking about the pay cheque more than the actual film and I really need to stop doing that.’ He noted, in an understated way, ‘I know I lost a little bit of credibility along the way.’

  An interesting change in direction for Danny saw him making a name for himself on post-watershed comedy quiz series. Multiple appearances on celebrity-baiting panel shows such as Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Celebrity Juice and 8 Out of 10 Cats were probably intended as a means to mock Danny – the theory being that by giving him uncensored airtime and free rein to express his opinions on a wide range of subjects, it might result in him putting his foot in it and unwittingly create great c
omedy. These shows often used celebrities who might seem similarly down on their luck as easy targets for a laugh, but it’s unlikely the teams behind these shows had any idea how wrong they were with Danny, who truly shone in this environment. Free of the pre-watershed restrictions that had previously made him tense and tongue-tied, he was genuinely funny, uninhibited and possessed an unexpected ability to laugh at his media persona. Turning the whole situation on its head, he soon had everyone laughing with him, rather than at him.

  Several successful appearances led to Danny turning up as the most unlikely guest in Dictionary Corner on a special episode of Countdown, and eventually to a part in an ITV2 comedy set in ancient Rome entitled Plebs. Pitched as a cross between The Inbetweeners and Blackadder, Danny was cast as a gladiator in one episode and virtually stole the whole series with his hilariously deadpan performance (and a flash of his rear end!).

  In February 2012, Danny took steps to make amends for his EastEnders slip-up a few years earlier, accepting a role in Casualty, and in so doing, getting his relationship with the BBC back on track. He realized appearing on such a high-profile and much-loved series was another important shift into the mainstream. Yahoo! Lifestyle reported him as saying, ‘Casualty is a massive show, so I was honoured that they asked me [to do it].’ It was also a rare opportunity for Joanne and the kids to watch him in something relatively family friendly.

  What was emerging was a newly confident Danny, aware of his developing comedic muscle and enjoying the chance to play around with his own public persona, often contradicting people’s preconceived ideas about him with the varied roles he was willing to take, and showing himself to be a good sport, with a well-tuned sense of humour.

  In this context, Run for Your Wife may have looked like the perfect vehicle to break the procession of low-budget horror and British gangster films he was churning out.

  Beginning in 1983, Ray Cooney’s adult comedy ran for nine years in London’s West End. A huge hit, it became one of the most infamous examples of a uniquely British form of raunchy stage play – part Carry On, part farce. Cooney had spent the best part of thirty years dreaming of turning his play into a feature, and eventually, everything had come together and the film was scheduled to shoot the following year. Desperate for a change, Danny signed on to play John Smith, the bigamist taxi driver at the centre of the story who is desperately trying to keep his double life a secret from both his wives. Joining Danny in the other lead roles were Neil Morrissey, Denise van Outen and former Girls Aloud singer, Sarah Harding. Cooney pulled in every favour he was owed and rounded out the cast with a multitude of cameos from veteran British film, television and music legends, including Judi Dench, Cliff Richard, June Whitfield and Russ Abbot, as well as Bernard Cribbins and Richard Briers from the original stage production.

  It’s hard to imagine who thought it was a good idea to make the film at all – everything about it feels old-fashioned, and the innuendo-laden humour and slapstick are undoubtedly from another era. The end result was a bit of a mess: badly written and poorly acted.

  The reviews were some of the worst of Danny’s career. Anthony Quinn in the Independent summed it up, calling it a ‘catastrophe’, before launching into a truly memorable put-down: ‘Never in the field of light entertainment have so many actors sacrificed so much dignity in the cause of so few jokes.’

  The film’s very limited cinema release generated a pitiful box office that became a story in its own right. Danny told BBC Newsbeat, ‘All those cinemas were rammed when it was shown. It took £700 but the media don’t want to tell you that story. They want you to believe it was in 300 cinemas across the country.’ He appreciated he has become the easiest of targets, asking, ‘Who gets the flak? Me, chuck mud at me [and] it seems to stick.’ Gerard Gilbert, writing in the Independent, put it best as he recognized how much Danny had become a media punch-bag: ‘The failure of Run for Your Wife was just the latest stick with which his detractors chose to gleefully beat the thirty-five-year-old cockney actor who once inspired our greatest playwright, but who now inspires such headlines as, “Are there no depths to which Danny Dyer won’t plummet?”’

  Testament to the career slump Danny was in was the story he told on the film’s red carpet at the premiere in February 2013, saying that he had been mistaken for a real taxi driver during the making of the film. ‘People was like pulling me over and going, “Dan, I know your career’s going through a bit of a bad stage, but are you driving a cab now?” It was a bit of a kick in the bum, to be honest.’

  After the disaster of Run for Your Wife, Danny wanted to get back to what he does best and make a no-nonsense action movie. But this time he wanted to make something with a sizeable budget, high quality production values and a decent script. He was tired of letting his ever-loyal fans down and he was determined to give them a film he was proud to be in.

  Ironically, Vendetta would also see his debut as an out-and-out hard man. It was as if Danny was giving in to his harshest critics and somehow managing to stand defiant against them at the same time. Contrary to what most people assume, Danny has never really played a hard man in any of his movies – he is usually a working-class anti-hero, a normal person reacting to extreme or violent situations, sucked into an unfamiliar environment or someone looking to escape their criminal past.

  Vendetta was conceived as a twist on the Death Wish-type vigilante thrillers of the seventies, where, instead of an ordinary man forced to seek his own brand of justice when his life is turned upside down by violence, a highly trained former SAS interrogation officer uses the skills he has been taught to avenge his parents’ deaths at the hands of a gang of criminals. Danny loved the script, he told Total Film. ‘It’s the film I’ve been waiting for all my career. I’d been pretty depressed and lost my passion and obviously the phone wasn’t ringing. Then this came along. It was almost like I was being reborn . . . I had an opportunity to really show people that I am a serious actor.’

  Director Stephen Reynolds had wanted to work with Danny since he’d seen him in his first film, telling his wife, ‘I’m going to work with that man one day.’ His infectious enthusiasm seemed to lift Danny at yet another low point in his life, reigniting his passion for acting and kick-starting his self-belief again. He said in The Films of Danny Dyer, ‘He f*****g found me at a point in my life and my career where both fingers were crossed going to move on to the next level. He’s given me this great opportunity and [the chance to go] back to Human Traffic . . . [he’s] completely given me a lifeline . . . it has all come full circle.’

  He was extremely excited by the potential to atone for much of his output over the last few years. He channelled all his pent-up frustrations about his career, his critics and the film industry in general into the part, and delivered a mesmerizing and authentic portrayal of a man deeply affected by what he’s seen in combat. Driven by grief at the deaths of his parents, he also shows a gritty and unwavering resolve in his character’s desire to make amends.

  Danny was well aware he might be walking a thin line between condoning vigilante-style justice, but he argued, ‘We’re not saying it’s right to go on that urban safari, we’re just saying, “Would you, if someone you love was taken from you for no reason?” It’s a powerful piece of work.’

  The film’s producer, Jonathan Sothcott, spoke about Danny in his book, The Films of Danny Dyer, saying, ‘Although I consider Danny one of my close friends, the actor who came to work on Vendetta was different to the one I’d been on set with before.’ He revealed that Danny was now ‘determined, focused, an obsessive perfectionist. He took it incredibly seriously, and, of course, it shows in his performance.’

  There is no denying the film is a massive step up in terms of quality – from the other acting talent involved to the production design – and Danny gives one of his best performances in years, certainly his most compelling work since his Nick Love collaborations. Everyone involved with the project came away from it feeling they had done their best work. Dann
y told LoveFilm.com, ‘I’m over the moon with it ... personally as an actor, I feel that this has tested me more than anything I’ve done before.’ He explained, ‘I went to some really dark places on this film ... [and I] feel like I’ve really achieved something.’ Sothcott added, ‘What surprised me most about Danny, though, was how much he’s matured, not just as an actor but as a film star – he has educated himself about how the business works, he understands the expectations his fan base have of him (and is very careful not to let them down).’ He finished, ‘There was a time when Danny Dyer the character and Danny Dyer the man were almost interchangeable. Those days are long gone.’

  It would seem Danny had made peace with his past and was ready to look towards his future. The experience on Vendetta had settled his mind and he had determined where his career was headed. Danny was about to accept a role that would consume him, send him off into uncharted waters and change his whole life.

  By the time it came to promote Vendetta in 2013, Danny was in quite a different place. A door that had seemed closed to him – in fact it had been more or less slammed shut a few years earlier – was about to be reopened. He had been approached again by the team behind EastEnders, and this time he’d said ‘Yes’. Interviewed by Total Film magazine, Deputy Editor Jamie Graham noted, ‘Today is the fourth time Total Film has interviewed Dyer in the last four years, the first time he’s made eye contact’, speculating that Danny’s improved demeanour, as well as his change of heart about joining the show, may have been largely down to him being ‘in a better place mentally and a worse place professionally’. But Danny wanted to make it clear that, as far as he was concerned, it was a two-way street and EastEnders needed him as much as he needed EastEnders. He said to the magazine, ‘The show’s going through a strange stage and they asked me to come in to maybe give it an injection.’