We all think we know what it’s like to spend an hour in the company of Danny Dyer, but sometimes things don’t pan out the way you expect. On this sunny Friday morning, the Dyer that greets Radio Times seems distracted and, at times, prickly. Immediately after our chat, he’ll be boarding a train to go and watch Oasis opening their feverishly anticipated reunion tour. “It’s a shame it’s up in Cardiff,” he says. “It’s a bit of a mission for me, but I know Noel Gallagher and he invited me up there, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to see what the vibe is.’”
The vibe, as it turns out, will be just fine. Later that night, Dyer’s pal, wrestler and Two Doors Down actor Graeme “Grado” Stevely, will post a selfie of the pair of them at the gig, and those images will end up on the websites of all the usual tabloids – more of the clickbait that seems to be getting him down on the morning of our encounter. “I find with journalism now, what even is it any more? It’s getting people to click a button and then you go on it and go, ‘Actually, that headline’s nothing like the article.’”
So, what to do? Try and make our encounter sound tedious beyond belief? Well, the truth is you have to really go out of your way to make a Danny Dyer interview boring. Case in point: within seconds, he’s bringing his unfiltered energy to bear upon another aspect of online life, the algorithmically-tailored stream of content he finds it almost impossible to resist. Popping up in his feed the other day was a video of a rat catcher and his dog. “A geezer with a Jack Russell, and there was a rat stuck behind a television set. He comes in and his little dog can’t wait to go and get this f***ing rat.”
“I’ve become quite adept now at catching them. They can’t resist peanut butter. Sometimes they’ve got a little mate helping them, holding up the trap while they lick the peanut butter off, but if you put it in the sweet spot, they can’t help their little selves. And so I’ll kill them and chuck them in the forest so the foxes can have a little munch, instead of eating my grandkids’ nappies out of my dustbin.”
You might say he’s having a moment. But the truth is that his “moment” hasn’t abated since 2022, when he left EastEnders, uncertain if there would be a place for him on our screens as anyone other than Queen Vic landlord Mick Carter. But the past 18 months have seen him harvest acclaim (and much female adoration) for his turn as Freddie Jones in Rivals on Disney+, for his Channel 4 documentary How to Be a Man and a lead role in Nick Love’s latest flick, Marching Powder. Then there’s also the matter of the Bafta he won back in May for best male performance in a comedy in Mr Bigstuff.
Perhaps surprisingly, he’s not a fan of “the canned laughter type of comedy of my youth – for me Only Fools and Horses doesn’t really work now”. But give him Bill Hicks or Ricky Gervais, stand-up comedy that “doesn’t give a f***”, and he’s happy. He still doesn’t think that Gervais, or anyone else, for that matter, has yet to match The Office – “this character that’s so obsessed with himself that he doesn’t realise what a dickhead he is.”
Sampson wrote the scene imagining what it might be like if Clint Eastwood had fallen on hard times on an Essex housing estate, a high watermark of silliness maintained by a succession of twists and turns, which include Glen’s fiancé Kirsty (Harriet Webb) trying to address his erectile dysfunction with a little Supernanny cosplay, and, perhaps best of all, a cameo from a sexually rapacious Rula Lenska that concludes with Lee coughing up a single red pubic hair. “Obviously we didn’t ask Rula for that,” explains Sampson. “That came from our make-up artist, Sam, who kindly snipped off a lock of her hair when the moment required it.”
If the only thing that a comedy does is make you laugh, then job done. But for anyone who knows a little about Dyer’s life, it’s impossible to miss passing similarities to his own story. The fact that Glen and Lee’s father isn’t dead but living a secret life has echoes of Dyer’s own childhood when, aged nine, he discovered that his dad had a whole other family in Paddington.
While Dyer takes the compliment, he adjusts the anglepoise onto the power in Sampson’s writing rather than anything that went on his own family. That’s hardly surprising given that it was Dyer who inspired Sampson to create Mr Bigstuff. The two met back in 2013 while filming in Bulgaria for ITV2’s Roman Empire comedy Plebs. Dyer’s arrival in Sofia caused something of a commotion thanks to his starring role as football hooligan Tommy Johnson in 2004’s The Football Factory, which was a huge hit in eastern Europe.
Upon arrival, Dyer recalls the shock that greeted cast and crew as leaflets directed at Sampson, who is gay, were distributed, advising men not to hold hands in public. Dyer used his profile to ensure that no one in their party came to any trouble. “I got us into some nightclubs where the bouncers looked after us,” he recalls. The affection in which Sampson and Dyer continue to hold each other was evident during Dyer’s Bafta acceptance speech, which he used to call a tearful Sampson “one of the best actors this country’s ever produced”, adding “he’s never done the same thing twice, which is not something that I can say”.
Famously, Dyer was Harold Pinter’s muse during the latter years of his life, starring in three of his plays. Dyer says he had no idea who Pinter was before the Nobel-winning playwright invited him, aged 22, to audition for his play Celebration. At the end of its run, the cast presented Pinter with a signed poster. The message Dyer scrawled on it – to Pinter’s delight – was, “Harold, you’re the f***ing bollocks”.
If he hasn’t always been able to choose jobs that look good on his CV, he puts that down to the need to provide for the family he has had since he was 18, when he became father to his daughter Dani – winner of Love Island in 2018 and now a TV presenter herself. He briefly earned the nickname “DVD Danny”, because his stock-in-trade had become straight-to-DVD documentaries about hard men that played up to the working-class “geezer” stereotype. Not high art, but in getting him on the property ladder, they served a purpose. “Can the class thing be used against you?” he ponders. “Of course it can.”
Though he’s itching to return to theatre, Dyer maintains there are some things he can never imagine himself doing. Although his Rivals co-star Alex Hassell is trying to convince him to do Shakespeare, he says, “whatever I do next, it won’t be f***ing Shakespeare, I’ll tell you that now. Maybe when I’m pushing 60 I’ll have a go at it, but at the moment, not for me.”
Dyer hasn’t had time to think about his impending 48th birthday on 24 July. But it will almost certainly be spent in Bristol where filming is under way for season two of Rivals. “I can’t reveal much,” he says, “but what I will say is that we’ve got no issues with the old second album syndrome. I’ve been blessed with a lovely character. He’s not the lead and he doesn’t need to be the lead, same as Katherine [Parkinson who plays his love interest, romance author Lizzie Vereker]. And yes, we do get a bit more Freddie and Lizzie this time around.”
The last time that happened was back in 2020 when lockdown hit and he quickly needed something to occupy his “nutty brain”. Taking matters into his own hands, he bought a Lego Hogwarts Castle complete with classrooms, towers, Hagrid’s hut, five boats and Whomping Willow. Then he moved on to “a Lamborghini, which you assembled from, I don’t know, 35 bags...” And so now, his happy place is the loft where he dons circular LED magnifying spectacles designed for precision modelling or, as he calls it, “building shit”.
“I recently built a library with staircases and little books in it and little lamps on the wall, but I f***ing broke the roof as I put it on. I was fuming.” Undeterred, as soon as he wraps on Rivals, he’s ready to embark on his next project: “A little 1940s train carriage with leather seats, with a conveyor belt that makes it look like the train’s moving.” Adorable, right? And the train sounds nice, too.
'It nearly killed me'Mr Bigstuff's Ryan Sampson on the perils of writing under pressure
When he won, we just hugged each other and I could feel us both shaking. I feel like he’s become a big brother character to me. People don’t know what he’s really like. He’s very, very loving and protective. I’m nervous and twitchy, and he’s understanding of thatand wants to make sure that I’m all right.
It’s based on elements from my family — I’ve laced into it quite a lot of little references to our life. So in series one, there’s an egg cup that their mum always really liked, and it’s the actual egg cup that my mum had, this weird little monk one. I was nervous about how they’d take it because sometimes the things that I’m writing can be a little bit confronting, but I think they understand that my way of getting my feelings out is by writing about them.
I only had four and a half months to write it because I was shooting Brassic, and you need a lot longer. So I had to write all day, every day, every weekend, for months. You don’t want to show you can do it in half the time but I nearly killed myself doing it. I really did. It’s not a good advert, is it? But weirdly, this season is definitely better. It’s significantly madder. Every episode has got this big, insane bit. I feel like I’m leaning into what I find funny, weird and strange.
It was a dream because this time I wasn’t as nervous, whereas last time I was s***ting myself. When you’ve written something and you’re filming it, there are thousands of things that could go wrong every day, and everyone’s trying to spin all the plates all the time. But coming back to a second series, it was fun instead of just being this terrifying rollercoaster.
I watched it all. I think he and Katherine Parkinson stole the show. There are a lot of characters who are sexy and rakish, whereas their two characters are genuinely lovable. Some actors, it’s like they’ve got no skin. Emotion just permeates them and they’re being real in the moment. When you’ve got two actors who can do that, it’s magic.
And have there been any conversations about a third season of Mr Bigstuff?I’m already coming up with ideas. We’ve got a kind of trajectory of where it goes. But we’ll see! ABBY ROBINSON
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