The Danny Dyer fanbase is an eclectic one. There are the ravers who got in on the ground floor, idolising Moff, the ranting pill dealer Dyer played in the 1999 film Human Traffic. There are the “sort of alpha males”, as he calls them; basically, lads who were into The Football Factory and his run of 00s films about hooliganism, drugs and sex (usually all three). Then, a nine-year run in EastEnders brought onside a lot of “old ladies”, he says. And now, with the success of Rivals – the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s book, in which he plays the kind-hearted self-made millionaire Freddie Jones – a hornier faction has joined his supporters’ ranks.
“I’m getting a lot of women of a certain age and a certain class come up to me in the street,” says Dyer, “you know, just sort of drooling.”
The 47-year-old’s turn as an unlikely sex symbol for middle-class women is a mark of the mainstream appeal Dyer now holds. It’s taken a while. For much of Dyer’s early career, he played working-class men struggling with the moral dilemmas presented by violence, sex, drugs and crime – a subgenre he labels “the Cockney Goodfellas”. And he was very good at it. But it led to typecasting – touring the world to interview hooligans and hardmen for TV documentaries, for example. For many, he was a punchline, a figure for easy parody.
“I feel like I do divide,” he says. “Not so much now, but I think I divided people. I was an icon and a legend, or a joke. And I still get the odd message: people can’t believe I’m an actor. Well, what the fuck am I?”
Today, sitting in the fancy London offices of his PR team, Dyer is in the middle of a victory lap, having enjoyed a string of glowing profiles and universal acclaim for Rivals. “It’s a revelation to me,” he says. “I’m only doing what I’ve always done. It’s interesting that the people who laughed and sneered at me have disappeared, because they know it’s not the popular opinion.”
Dyer’s latest film, Marching Powder, is something of a revert to type. Part gritty romcom, part social commentary about, well, men, the film follows bloated, balding football fan Jack (Dyer), who’s pushing 50 but still going out with his mates, snorting cocaine and fighting. It’s his fifth collaboration with Nick Love, with whom he made The Football Factory, the 00s drama about hooliganism. Marching Powder is not so much a Football Factory reboot as a “where are they now?” update: there are broken men, addiction, violence, swearing, angst about how men spend their time and angst about what the younger generation will become (Dyer’s son, Arty, plays his onscreen son). There’s also anger: at the state of the country, the “establishment”, the left, the right, entitled millennials, “the woke lot”, etc.
“There’s a lot of me in this film,” says Dyer. “I mean, where does Jack sit in society? His optics are all wrong. White, middle-aged, working class, been a fuck-up most of his life. Where does he sit in society now?”
While The Football Factory was an earnest, heavily signposted fable about violence, Marching Powder takes itself far less seriously. “We’re highlighting the ridiculousness of masculinity,” says Dyer. But, more importantly, he adds: “We don’t sneer at the culture. We show a slice of that life, but we certainly don’t mock it or wag our finger at it. We’re just trying to be authentic when we tell the story.”
Dyer doesn’t think football hooliganism is any worse than it was 20 years ago when The Football Factory came out. “What’s worse is gangs on the streets,” he says. “It’s all about postcodes now, which is similar to football hooliganism in the sense it’s different clubs, it’s a tribal thing.”
Does he think violence is nature or nurture? “I think it’s a bit of both really,” he says. “I do think we were all born as a blank canvas. These young men … they probably haven’t got a father figure … so they go and find community and they feel that they’re loved by their gang so therefore they do silly things.”
One common criticism of The Football Factory was that it was irresponsible and glamorised football violence. Dyer says he’s already come across similar views about Marching Powder, this time for its depiction of cocaine. “I think I’ve got that social butterfly thing where I mix in both circles and believe you me, everyone’s fucking at it,” he says. “It is classless actually, that drug.”
The film’s title is an obvious euphemism for cocaine and he’s received the “same old bollocks” complaints that they are “glamorising” the drug. “But you need to watch the film to understand there’s nothing glamorous about cocaine in this film. It destroys lives, and it needs to be highlighted in the right way.”
Dyer is open about his relationship with drugs. In his 2010 book, Straight Up: My Autobiography, he writes about smoking cannabis as a kid, but turning to speed as a teenager to help cope with the loss of his grandfather to prostate cancer. It didn’t help that, at the start of his career, a lot of his fame was tied up with his performance as Moff in Human Traffic; when he went out, fans expected him to party hard. And he admits to playing up to that a bit. “It came with fame and the industry that we’re in, there’s a lot of drugs in most industries to be honest and of course being a working-class male, it’s part of just going out and getting on it.”
For the most part, Dyer could get away with hitting it hard while working. Just about. In his autobiography, he recounts a shoot in Ibiza for the made-for-TV-movie Is Harry on the Boat? where he was so rundown from drink and drugs that one side of his face broke out in an ulcer – the director had to make sure he was only shot from the other side. Then there’s the infamous time he was up all night smoking crack in New York and forgot his lines on stage the next day while performing Harold Pinter’s Celebration.
“I needed a little bit of validation in my life and I didn’t quite realise what was wrong,” he says. “I was working, I had money all of a sudden, I moved into a nice house and still wasn’t happy, still something was missing.” It took Dyer a stint in rehab and therapy to understand that his drug addiction was rooted in a lack of male role models. He learned about meditation, breath work and quietening down his brain.
And his relationship with drugs now? “Listen, I’ve had my issues with it. As a grandfather, it’s not my thing,” he says. Dyer has three children with his long-term partner, Joanne Mas, who he has been with since he was 13. His eldest child, Love Island season 4 winner Dani, had twins in 2023. “I’ve certainly been to plenty of parties and I’ve lived a life. I’ve got to a point where I’ve got rid of all my vices.” All that’s left is smoking cigarettes, which he wants to give up. “It’s fucking irritating, man. I want to try and be around for as long as I can.”
Dyer was born in 1977, in Custom House in London’s East End. His father left the family when he was nine, though Dyer has a good relationship with both his parents today. He fell in love with drama at school, joined a drama class in nearby Canning Town, which opened him up to auditions and, at 14, he landed a role as an underage sex worker in the TV series Prime Suspect. At 21, he got his breakthrough part in Human Traffic and just a few years later, the lead in The Football Factory.
Outside film and TV, Dyer earned prestige from performing in three Harold Pinter plays – he viewed the playwright as a mentor and father figure. But for a long time he was never quite able to capitalise on his leading-man potential. He turned to presenting documentaries such as Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men. He doesn’t regret the decision today – he needed the money – but it made acting work hard to come by.
“I’d done some big stuff, but I hadn’t really been paid for it because that was the nature of the game.” He’d take on jobs at low rates hoping it would lead to something more lucrative. “But I made so many bad decisions. I ended up with a lot of fame, no money, going to nightclubs and waving off of balconies and pretending to be a DJ. Quite a dark time in my life.”
By the time EastEnders came knocking in 2013, “I was on my arse,” he says. Playing Mick Carter, landlord of The Queen Vic, gave Dyer stability when he needed it most. But it did also limit other opportunities. “I was crossed off of every casting list,” he says. “EastEnders takes up a lot of your life. You’ve got money but you ain’t got time to go to a cashpoint. But it did get me out of a lot of trouble and opened me up for other opportunities.”
Leaving EastEnders in 2022 was a “roll-the-dice” moment, but it made space for projects such as Marching Powder and Rivals. Rivals poses a lot of questions about relationships, chief among them: how do you keep a longterm partner interested? “I’ve been with the same girl for 33 years,” says Dyer. “It’s difficult. You’ve got to make a lot of sacrifices. You’ve got to accept people for their flaws. I couldn’t see myself with anybody else … She’s somebody that’s been a huge constant in my life, through the ups and the downs, and I’ve dragged her through a lot of shit, I know I have.”
His advice on parenting is more … pragmatic. “I’ve got 10 years between my kids, so we’ve been doing school runs for 25 years. I would advise people to bang out your kids in quick succession. It’s difficult, but you will get your life back at some point.”
Ever since Dyer’s takedown of David Cameron back in 2018, when he called him a “twat” with his “trotters up” on ITV’S Good Evening Britain, people genuinely want to hear his political commentary. “It’s the classism thing again,” he says. “I’ve got a working-class voice and that stands out somewhat.”
And he has no qualms saying exactly what he thinks. In our hour-long chat he covers a lot of ground, most of it unprompted: the working class (“left behind”), social division (“everyone’s at each other’s throats”), the elite (“no one’s really taking notice of the ones at the top that are taking the piss”), the Labour party, tax, farmers, nurses’ pay, the lack of ambulances, cuts to the police, rising crime and paedophilia within the church.
Where does he get his news from – newspapers? “No, fuck no,” he says, “I stay away from it all. It’s all clickbait bollocks to me, especially online. You click on something, the headline is never actually the article, is it? So I tend to swerve it all, really.”
He’s pretty down on the UK’s prospects at the moment. “Everybody is,” he says. “Nobody is proud of it. It’s a frightening time. We need a good leader. We haven’t had one in such a long time. Who’s leading the country? Who do we trust? Because no one likes Starmer.”
There is no chance of him making a Trump-like swerve into politics. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I’m too busy. I love my job. I’m bringing up my children. I’ve got grandchildren. My clan’s getting bigger. As long as I’ve got my health and my family, I just try and have a nice life.” But, “We definitely do need more working-class people in politics. That’s where we’re going wrong. The people that are working class ain’t really, like, Wes Streeting isn’t, even Angela Rayner has lost the plot.”
From the sounds of it, Dyer’s social media feed is more likely to show him UFOs than political commentary. “My algorithms are definitely showing a lot of that shit because I talk about it a lot.” In 2010, Dyer presented a BBC doc on UFOs, I Believe in UFOs: Danny Dyer, for which he was roundly mocked (unfairly, I would say). Why does he think people find it so hard to believe in UFOs? “Maybe it’s fear,” he says. “But I think the likelihood is we can’t be the only thing circling the sun, that’s depressing.” Despite the reaction to the last UFO documentary he made, it’s a topic he’d be open to revisiting. “I find it all fascinating and I like to fantasise about it. Surely the day is upon us soon when they’re going to reveal themselves.”
Next on Dyer’s agenda: the draining of a hydrocele around his testicle (such is Dyer’s status as one of the UK’s designated spokespeople on masculinity, that when there is something wrong with his testicles it makes the news). “I think it is important to talk about these things,” he says. “Geezers should definitely check their bollocks. My grandfather died of prostate cancer, he just didn’t go to the doctors and he died within six months. I’ve had it checked and understand what it is, but it is a cosmetic surgery. Just needs to be drained.”
And that, in a nutshell, I guess, perfectly encapsulates Dyer’s appeal: self-effacing, knowingly hilarious, unapologetically honest. All the hallmarks of a British national treasure. If the consensus isn’t there yet that he is already, it’s surely only a matter of time.
“I don’t know. I get introduced as [a national treasure] sometimes and I don’t quite know how to take it,” he says. “I’m humbled by it, for sure. I’ve done some good work in my time. I’ve made mistakes. Maybe it’s because I’m accessible to people. I’ve been open and honest about my life and who I am. I’m proud of my roots. I’m not ashamed of it at all.”
• Marching Powder is in cinemas from 7 March
