Danny Dyer on going to rehab: ‘It’s about finding what’s missing within you’
“It was a crossroads in my life, and I needed to change shit. I needed to learn what was wrong with me and what the pain was inside of me”
Danny Dyer has discussed his stint in rehab in South Africa, and the realisations that led him to seek help.
Dyer on the cover of Rolling Stone UK for our April/May issue, out now, to discuss his various film and TV projects as well as life at large.
In the feature, the actor and national treasure talks about seeking help at a treatment centre in South Africa.
“I had a really good capacity for drinking and taking drugs,” he told Rolling Stone UK. “One person I hurt more than anyone was my wife. She was the one who was like, listen, I just want to have a glass of champagne with you again.”
After this conversation, Dyer says he interrogated his feelings and why he felt he needed to turn to drink and drugs. “Rehab is about finding what’s missing within you,” he said. “What is this validation you’re looking for and why are you sort of slowly destroying your life…
“It was a crossroads in my life, and I needed to change shit. I needed to learn what was wrong with me and what the pain was inside of me and why I was making bad decisions. The only way for me to do that was go off to a psychiatric unit.”
He then discussed his feelings around his father leaving the family when Dyer was young, and the secret family that his father had. “I learnt that I had a lot of abandonment issues, daddy issues and why that was making me press the fucking button,” he said, adding of rehab: “You sit in a circle, and you talk about the shit that’s happened throughout your life.”
He added: “It was difficult, but really, I just wanted to learn what was happening because when my dad left it was quite heavy for me and I didn’t know how to sit with it. Later in life, I just felt that any male role model was going to abandon me and so then I fucked up the relationship before they could.”
Elsewhere in the cover feature, Dyer discussed his despair at the state of UK politics in 2026, saying he hopes for a “big reset”. He said: “We’re just so fucking divided right now. The working classes, no matter what colour your skin is, are fighting each other and the elites are taking the fucking piss. It’s now very apparent they’re taking the piss, but instead of everyone coming together and looking up, we’re just fighting and blaming each other. It’s petrifying to be honest with you, I don’t know why we’ve digressed so much as human beings.”
Read Danny Dyer’s Rolling Stone UK cover feature in full here and order your print copy of the magazine here.