‘It’s been a mad old journey’: Danny Dyer on family, royalty and his tough guy image

It’s a beautiful day in Essex and I’m making myself at home with the Dyers. Theirs is a neat house on a hill, furnished in white and grey with a vast marble kitchen island and a bulldog called Debbie. And, no offence, but my God Debbie is large. The width and girth of a coffee table, she lumbers affectionately across the tiles towards Jo, Dyer’s partner of more than 30 years, elegant in white as she mourns a missing T-shirt, and their teenage daughter Sunnie, who sweeps through to grab a bottle of water on her way to college. Artie, who’s 10, is at school and their eldest daughter, Dani, is in Germany with her three children, aged three and under, there to support her footballer boyfriend Jarrod Bowen at the Euros. Builders sweat on the patio outside, the sun glints off shelves of awards. And there, in the middle of it all, grinning into a tiny coffee, is Dyer , calling everyone baby.

Dyer, Debbie and I stand in the awards alcove and with his pointing finger he takes me on a swift tour of his career. “I’ve nicked a few awards over the years I suppose,” he smiles. “I did really well, I can’t believe that.” There are National Television Awards won over his nine years on EastEnders , one of which he dedicated, in a choked acceptance speech, to his mentor Harold Pinter and children living in poverty, then there’s a framed photo of Pinter and an Attitude award he won for being a “straight ally” for his first soap storyline. He’s proud of that one. “I remember when they approached me about EastEnders and I thought, obviously I’m going to be coming in as a gangster or something like that. Alpha male, working class, anti-gay.” Then they said his first storyline would involve his son coming out to him. “They created this character for me who was an alpha male, but who wore a pink dressing gown. Somebody that is very protective, can swing a right hander, but will open up about his feelings.” The dog gives me a pointed look, as if to check I can tell he’s talking about himself.

This is set to be the year of Danny Dyer. As well as his TV comedy debut, in Ryan Sampson’s Mr Bigstuff on Sky, he’s starring in Disney’s glossy new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals (“Wait until you see Danny,” co-star David Tennant said, “He’s brilliant.”) and a film about football hooliganism called Marching Powder . Today he’s wearing a large gold watch that glitters as he sips his coffee – in front of him now on the impossibly tidy kitchen counter are a baby’s dummy and white dice, into which I idly read some light symbolism. His family have left the room and he marvels briefly. “Me and Jo have been together since we were 13. Which just doesn’t happen, does it, now? It’s fascinating to me, still. When I look at her, part of me sees her back then, but then I also look at the pair of us and go, ‘Wow, we’re grandparents now.’ It’s been a mad old journey.”

They grew up on the same council estate in east London, where, when Dyer was nine years old, his father left them for his other, secret family. Dyer’s reaction was rage; he was in constant trouble until his drama teacher enrolled him in a Saturday club where he was spotted by an agent and, at 16, cast in Prime Suspect . He and Jo had Dani two years later. “I remember on Twitter someone said, ‘The most Danny Dyer thing Danny Dyer’s ever done is calling his kid Dani Dyer,’” Dyer says, wrinkling his nose, “And I thought, ‘What the fuck does that even mean?’” It’s just what you do , he mumbles; you name your kid after yourself. He laughs. When she won Love Island in 2018, “All of a sudden, I was the second most famous Danny Dyer in the country.”

Why did he roll his eyes at the idea of East Enders casting him as a gangster?

“I think I’m falling into the category where people either respect me as an actor or they think that I play myself. So that’s been a running theme throughout my life.” He muses for a second. “There’s an element of classism in it, because I speak in a cockney accent. But I think my mistake was that I’ve probably done too many documentaries [like Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men , or I Believe in UFOs ] and revealed too much about myself as a human being. Because as actors our toolbox is us. If you give away all your stuff, then people watch you and go, ‘Oh he’s just playing himself.’ But that’s what acting is. We’re salespeople. Do you believe it? Do you buy it? Do you give a fuck about what I’m talking about? It’s not about whether you can do hundreds of accents. In my eyes, it’s like, do you believe what I’m saying? Do you care? And so you have to dig within.”

On the other hand, it’s been these documentaries that have brought him a lot of fans, and fame. “I divide opinion, but I think that’s fine. I struggled with it as a younger actor and when social media first came around. But I’m absolutely fine with it now.” The struggle, back then, was well documented in the tabloids. There were cheating scandals and drug scandals. One night in 2001 he was on stage in New York, in Pinter’s Celebration , and he went blank. He was 24 and had stayed up all night smoking crack. Pinter “bollocked” him, but it took a few more years before Dyer took himself to rehab, slowly becoming the meditative family man he is today.

“You’ve got to try and squeeze as much fucking joy out of life as you possibly can,” he goes on. “Because the one thing I learned when I was going through some crazy times is that your fucking brain is your worst enemy. It questions us all the time and we can’t escape it.” Every evening he takes 10 minutes to meditate, “and just completely concentrate on my breath, and let all the fucking shit go, then have a good night’s sleep and then attack the day again.” In rehab he had therapy, where for the first time he started talking about his father. “There’s little holes. You’ve got stuff missing within your soul and you don’t know why and you try and fill it with drugs or drink and it doesn’t work. And so I learned from going to therapy that I had abandonment issues from men.”

After his father left, his beloved grandad died from cancer, “and that sent me off the rails a little bit, but then that was around the time I met Pinter. I wasn’t looking for a father figure, but he took me under his wing.” When Pinter died in 2008, “I pushed my ‘fuck-it button’. It was about destroying relationships before they could fuck me over. Which is why I sort of went a bit crazy.” Therapy helped him understand himself, but, “I think doing Who Do You Think You Are? helped me as well.” This is the BBC genealogy show that, in 2016, aired its “best episode ever”. Dyer had no idea, after they’d investigated his family tree, what they were going to reveal.

“I knew there was an energy,” he remembers. “I thought it might have something to do with criminality. I was hoping for some sort of old-school Shakespearean actor, something that would make me go, ‘Oh I’ve got it in my blood.’ Then, the way it panned out was fucking ridiculous.” Dyer discovered he was a direct descendant of King Edward III; when he was told, sitting in the choir of Westminster Abbey, he looked as though he was going to faint.

The relative he was more excited to discover, though, was Thomas Cromwell, his “15 times great-grandfather. He was a working-class kid who rose through the ranks and was really clever and became a medieval righthand man, and he had no right! And so I thought, ‘OK, I can see similarities in the sense that he had no right to be where he was either.’” He thinks for a second. “And his downfall obviously was that he became almost too powerful and he didn’t fit the mould. He didn’t have any aristocrat parents to get him out of trouble. And his last act, his last roll of the dice…” he grins, surprised to find he is, in fact, holding some dice, “which is why I’m sitting here today, is that he got his son to marry Jane Seymour’s sister. If he hadn’t done that Gregory would have been killed as well.” Then they had a child and their child had a child, “and then I’m 15 generations later. He was really famous and out of his depth slightly. So it made me go, ‘My life makes sense to me now’.”

Does he regret doing the other documentaries? “No, not really, because I needed money to feed my children. I’m just plying my trade as an actor, like a spark would, or a plumber.” Twenty years ago he made a film called The Football Factory , “which made me very famous, but I didn’t get any money for it. So I was stuck in that weird room of being famous, but not having the money to back it up.” Then the documentaries came along. “I had no desire to run around the country speaking to hooligans, meeting them under dark tunnels with balaclavas on and all that. I wasn’t on something journalistic, but it got me a house. That’s the truth.”

At the time he was still living on the same council estate where he’d grown up. “I’m very proud of where I’m from. I’m very proud of my roots. And I love the people who inhabit them spaces, but I knew that I needed to get out and try and give my kids a better life.” Which again, he doesn’t regret, but it does add a layer of confusion to his family life. “Trying to instil working-class values in kids who are being driven around in a fucking Bentley is very difficult, you know?”

He moved to Essex, had more children, and went viral a number of times for his political commentary. (One memorable clip from 2018 saw him opposite Jeremy Corbyn on Good Morning Britain questioning why David Cameron, “that twat” had “disappeared” amid the Brexit chaos. “He’s in Nice with his trotters up! He should be held accountable for it!”) Yet he says the press still associate him with violence.

“The media have always labelled me ‘hard-man Danny Dyer’. I don’t know where that’s come from. Is it going back to classism and because I swear a lot? Is it that? It always seems to be about trying to bring me down and catch me out. Especially now in a world of cancel culture.” In 2010, he was sacked from a ghost-written column in lads mag Zoo , for apparently advising a man who couldn’t get over his ex-girlfriend to “cut his ex’s face, then no one will want her”. It had been a line from a film, he said he’d been misquoted, but the backlash was serious and still impacts the way he’s seen. “Everything’s divisive, you know. We’re all being segregated, we’ve regressed as a human race, I feel. There’s no love. Why the fuck are we not looking after each other as human beings? What’s going on? It’s probably because the elite have been exposed a little bit. And the media are fighting back, making us go, well, you’re either this or you’re that. You can’t be all things.”

We’re meeting the week before the election, and Dyer’s ambivalent about voting. He sighs. “What does worry me, I suppose, is the Tories have fucked it so much that they disappear off the face of the earth, and then Labour get in and there’s no one to challenge them. There’s just something about Starmer I can’t quite buy into. I feel he’s trying too hard to be a common person.” Watching the debates, he found himself asking, “‘What the fuck? You are a knight, but you’re meant to be part of a working-class party?’ I just despair at it all and don’t really believe a lot of what they say. Let’s see what the fuck happens and hopefully it changes for the better. I pray, for everybody’s sanity.”

He downs his coffee, bitterly. “I don’t know, darling, we’re so lost. Everybody hates the Tories and quite rightly, but we’re not inspired by the Labour party. Who the fuck do we trust? We need more working-class people in politics, it’s very simple. Maybe they’ll put Angela Rayner in later, when Keir gets found out. I watch her and go, ‘I believe you. I believe your soul.’ And they’re all pretty soulless at the moment, I think.” He shrugs.

When Dyer made How to be a Man , his most recent documentary, “I felt the idea of masculinity was being manipulated,” he says. I mention Nigel Farage’s recent praise of Andrew Tate and his defence of “male culture”. Dyer leans back. “Andrew Tate only exists because the media write about how masculinity is toxic. That’s how you create a space for Andrew Tate to exist. Some of the stuff he says is very fucking interesting. The problem is, he’s such a cock. It’s OK to want to be a provider and protector, it’s a natural instinct for a man. But if we’re going to keep bollocking men for being too masculine and also bollocking them for not opening up about their feelings… You can’t have it both ways.” He sees how his daughters “think they want a bit of a prick, someone who’s unattainable, a bad boy. But actually later on in life, which is what Dani’s learned, they want a man who’s going to be strong and there for her.” He looks like he’s welling up when he talks about her partner, West Ham forward Bowen. “What Jarrod did by taking on her son at 18 months old, it says a lot about a man.” And to have a West Ham player as a son-in-law? He grins. “That’s a real bonus for me as a dad.”

He laughs about his new era, as a 46-year-old grandfather to three toddlers, pointing now to the dummy on the counter. “Every day is a fucking lesson to me and throwing being a grandad into the mix, it’s a fucking amazing feeling.” He describes the logistics of babysitting as if it’s a football game, gesturing with swift firm movements. “So you’ve got twins that are one, and all they want to do is kill themselves. So what they do is they wait for that door to open and they make a bolt for it so they can roll down the stairs.” He is responsible for making sure they don’t die. “But at the same time, you’ve got the three-year-old running around smashing shit up and he likes to wind us up by opening the door.”

A footballer’s career is short, he points out, so while Dani is parenting alone much of the time now, Bowen will be back with his family for good in a few years. Dyer can relate to the idea of sacrificing your home life for a career. “It’s all intense and it’s wonderful and then you just wake up one day and it’s done, and then you come back to your life.” He picks up the dice again. “You commit completely fully, you hold your soul to it, and then it stops, and then you have to come back and sort of just, shrug it off, you know what I mean?”

In his new comedy, Mr Bigstuff , Dyer’s character arrives to teach his estranged brother how to be a man. “It’s like, you need to find that inner cunt inside you. And when I use that word, it’s all about intent.” What is a perfect man? “I would like to think the perfect man will be able to build you a cupboard, but also like a bit of a gossip. So I can curl up on the sofa and watch Marley and Me and cry. But also be able to throw his missus around the bedroom like a caveman.”

As he entered his 40s, Dyer realised he was questioning himself less. “I know what I’m about now – you tend to not care so much about what people fucking think about you.” Looking in the makeup mirror on a recent job, he says: “I started to notice I was going bald, but I realise that’s part of the ageing process. I understand I’m starting to be the shape of an avocado. But that’s what a middle-aged body is. And I’m accepting it. I smoke and I drink, I like to enjoy life, and I don’t want to become a person who calls potatoes ‘carbs’. I don’t want white bread to be the enemy. So I’m a middle-aged man and I enjoy it.”

He gazes briefly, proudly around his clean white house and Debbie huffs her way towards him, collapsing like a tyre at his feet. “It’s weird getting older, because you become aware of how long you’ve got left. I reckon I’ve got another half my life to go” – finally, he throws the dice – “and I intend to enjoy it.”

All episodes of Mr Bigstuff are available on Sky and NOW from 17 July

Styling by Helen Seamons and Steph Stevens; photographer’s assistant Adam Orzechowski; grooming by Dani Guinsberg using Shakeup Cosmetics