Danny Dyer: Custom Made

‘Idon’t do New Year’s Resolutions,” Danny Dyer states emphatically as he nurses a Bloody Mary on a Friday morning in early January. “I just think that’s all bollocks.”

Nothing can quite prepare you for the first time you hear Danny Dyer swearing while up close and personal. You are likely to find yourself grinning, immediately at ease, and perhaps best of all, get the weird feeling that you’ve known the east London actor and – as we’ll touch on shortly – now bonafide national institution, for your entire life.

Which, in fairness, many of us almost have. That’s what tends to happen when, over a 30-year career, someone becomes deeply engrained in the national psyche and instantly recognisable to so many people for so many reasons. To a generation of young men in the late 90s and early 2000s, he was the poster boy for hedonism and living for the weekend, through films such as Human Traffic and The Football Factory, which cemented Dyer’s place as a household name. But he was as divisive as Marmite too. For all his fans, a lot of his critics – who Dyer has often accused of classism – saw him as representative of something rawer, unrefined and boorish. But in recent years, Dyer has achieved something that, in fairness, even he never saw coming: fully establishing himself as a national treasure. 

In 2026, the Danny Dyer that sits before me is a BAFTA winner for Mr Bigstuff (“I’m so fucking proud of that”), a beloved custodian of EastEnders’ Queen Vic as Mick Carter, an unlikely political pundit (more on that later) and – as made clear by the recognisable moustache he sports today – a scene-stealer in Rivals. All of these things have helped him become a quintessentially British star.   

Dyer’s next project arrives on Friday (March 13) in the form of One Last Deal, which sees him tackle one of the most challenging roles of his career. The overbearing machismo of fictional football agent Jimmy Banks might be in line with some of his previous work, but this particular film is set exclusively in the agent’s office, and it is Dyer and Dyer alone who appears. The result is 90 minutes of pressure-cooker tension.  

“It feels like a fucking nutty episode of The Twilight Zone,” he reflects. “We filmed it in Dublin, and we’d shoot 15 pages of dialogue a day. I’d sit there with a pint of Guinness learning my lines. Drilling it, drilling it, drilling. Because I think there was a part of them that thought I wasn’t going to be able to do it and I’d have to be fed dialogue through an earpiece. It was a real test, but I fucking did it. Even if you don’t like me, you’ve got to respect the fact that I did do it.”  

It also arrives at a time when Dyer’s stock has rarely been higher. He’s speaking to Rolling Stone UK on a rare day off from shooting series two of Rivals – Disney+’s bonkbuster adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire books. Series one of the show was a revelation and saw Dyer – who plays Freddie Jones – attract some of the best reviews of his career. It established him as a cuddly, quietly sexy and charming Cockney salesman, while his affair with Katherine Parkinson delivered the show’s emotional heart.  

For Dyer – the boy from Custom House made good – there’s also the joy that Freddie is “working class, but also the richest one there. I’d just come out of EastEnders, and I was looking for work when Rivals came around, and it was produced by Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who told me that Freddy would be a teddy bear with a bite,” he explains. 

“I said yes without reading it and it was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life, really. Me and Katherine Parkinson were blessed with these beautiful, touching scenes, and getting to work with actors like David Tennant, Aidan Turner and Alex Hassell has been a complete joy.

“It also helps we had a no-arsehole policy,” he adds. “Everyone was completely vetted and we look after each other and we love each other dearly.” 

Hanging over season two, he adds, is the fact that Jilly Cooper died midway through production. All of the main cast attended a memorial service in her honour in January, and Dyer says it heightened the desire to make the upcoming second series a hit. 

“We lost Jilly during shooting, and it made things even more emotional,” reflects Dyer. “She’s part of the fabric and you definitely feel like she’s in the air. Which makes it even more of a shame that she won’t see it. It’s been a long shoot and when we all got the tragic news, it just gave us another push to go, ‘Right, let’s get this done and make it as brilliant as it can be.’” 

For all the acclaim that Dyer achieved as Freddy, however, he says it’s hard to shake the sense that a lot of the praise was written by critics through “gritted teeth”. He may have been declared a sex symbol as a result of the show, but it’s also true that the title was often prefaced with the word “unlikely”. He adds that another review of Rivals, particularly damning with faint praise, said the “biggest plot twist” about the series is that Danny Dyer can act. 

“It’s been a surprise to me, all of a sudden, that I’m being acknowledged by the critics that have just seen me as a bit of a laughing stock over the years,” he admits. 

“But I’m so long in the game now, I don’t take anything to heart. What I’m doing is not trying to change the world. I’m not claiming to be Marlon Brando; I’m just providing for my family, and as an actor that’s a really difficult thing to do. Can I keep working? Can I keep paying bills? Can I give my family a good life? That’s essentially what my drive is and that’s what I’m in it for. If, along the way, people want to dig me out for some of the films I’ve done in the past, then that’s fine.”  

The one that stuck in the craw, he admits, however, was after his BAFTA win for Mr Bigstuff, when a Guardian article decried that “Danny Dyer Deserves Nothing”. The article was, admittedly, a little kinder, but few went beyond the headline. 

“I thought, ‘That’s a bit fucking moody, isn’t it,’” he reflects. “I’ve got a couple of actor friends that actually emailed the guy and said, ‘That’s disgusting.’ Why would you do that? I hadn’t even put the BAFTA on my shelf, and they’d written this entire article about me deserving nothing? Why come for me? I’m so proud of that BAFTA, just in the sense that it’s one of the hardest to win, comedy performance. It goes right back to Gervais, Coogan. People of that ilk win one.  

“But yeah, I take that shit on the chin now. I don’t entertain it and I don’t really give a fuck about what people think. I just don’t entertain it. I don’t know why you would… Everyone that’s famous is always going to have a segment of people that fucking hate your guts, no matter who you are. But I’ve also got my fan base that loves me and respects me and supports me, you know, I have it all.” 

Rivals may have cemented Dyer’s place as our newest national treasure, but there’s also plenty of people who have admired him ever since he went on ITV in 2018 and memorably called David Cameron a “twat” as the likes of Piers Morgan, Jeremy Corbyn and, randomly, Pamela Anderson watched on. He spoke for a nation when he demanded to know why the former prime minister was able to relax in France “with his trotters up” while the rest of Britain dealt with the fall-out of Brexit.  

Thankfully, things are a lot calmer now in the UK and there’s little reason for Dyer to bemoan the state of our once-beleaguered nation in our chat. Right? To quote the man himself: “Bollocks.” 

“We’re just so fucking divided right now,” he forthrightly explains. “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.  

“There’s not enough community. It’s all gone. My dad still lives in east London in Custom House, and he doesn’t really know anyone around. There are two pubs left and all the others have gone.” 

He adds: “There’s nothing in the centre either. It’s a tricky fucking time and I don’t know how Keir Starmer is hated by the extreme left and the extreme right. How does that work? I’ve said this before, but we just need some more people from working-class backgrounds [in Parliament] and that will save it. But there’s some corrupt shit going on upstairs, man, and there’s the fear that they’ll eventually get corrupted too. You’ve just got to sit back and watch it all unfold and hope that humanity finds its way again.” 

What about the rise of Nigel Farage?  

“Well, I think Labour and the Tories are responsible for the rise of Farage,” he says. “You can understand if those two parties aren’t doing it for people anymore, then they’ll look for an alternative in him. Polanski [too], the Greens’ bloke. He seems like he’s got something about him. He’s intelligent, but do people give a fuck about the Greens? I think no one really cares and that’s the trouble.” 

As it turns out, the man who famously presented the 2010 documentary I Believe in UFOs has a different theory altogether.  

“Misogyny, sexism, homophobia and racism are all on the rise again. We’ve regressed as human beings, so we need some sort of reset, don’t we? That’s why I’m praying [there are] fucking aliens out there that are gonna come down and change everything. 

“Who else is gonna fucking do it? I got obsessed with the [active comet] 3I/ATLAS for a little while, but it turned out to be fuck all. I really felt, ‘Maybe this is it. Maybe the aliens are going to show up.’ I’ve got this theory they’d tell us that maybe we are the aliens and during the dinosaur period, a UFO crashed into the earth and we’re the result of it. Because there’s a lot of mad shit going on in the world, so I do think that anything’s possible.”  

There’s a point during the video section of our photoshoot with Danny Dyer when he pulls out his phone to reveal a lock screen emblazoned with the face of the late Harold Pinter. The pair’s enduring relationship is well known, with Pinter famously choosing him for a production of Celebration in 2000 after Dyer walked into the audition room and introduced himself with a disarming “How are you doing, son?”

At this point, Dyer was the young actor who had dropped out of regular school, enrolled in drama school and bagged roles in shows such as Prime Suspect. It was Pinter who changed his life.  

“There was part of him that connected with me because we were both from the East End, but he didn’t speak like he was because he had to change his accent when he was young in the 50s to be an actor. I think that he encouraged me to stay who I was and I’ve always felt like he’s there for me. I think I need that in my life and he’s dragged me through. If I ever got offered a knighthood, he would be in my ear telling me to turn it fucking down.”  

It was Pinter who “put an arm” around Dyer when, as he has previously revealed, he smoked crack cocaine during a New York transfer of Celebration and froze on stage. 

“I’d split from Jo [Mas, his now wife] at the time and I was in a relationship that Harold didn’t approve of,” he reflects. “He made that very clear. Looking back, we were bad for each other and that’s where the crack smoking started to come in. But Harold knew exactly how to speak to me, and I think he knew maybe I would have gone really off the rails and got on a plane and fucked off and said, ‘Fuck you.’” 

When Pinter died in 2009, the grief of losing his mentor led Dyer to go on a bender. “That was a little grenade that made me explode and was part of the journey that eventually led me into rehab,” he says. 

That journey to rehab reached its eventual destination when Dyer’s drug-taking reached its peak in 2017. He previously told Louis Theroux how the moment of realisation came the morning after a night on the tiles at the National Television Awards, when he was struggling to get his jeans on and looked up to see his wife staring at him.   

Pinter, though dead for almost a decade at this point, was also the “higher power” that Dyer needed to get through rehab. 

“I took myself off to South Africa,” he explains. “Rehab is about finding what’s missing within you. What is this validation you’re looking for and why are you sort of slowly destroying your life. I needed some answers really. It partly stemmed from the characters I’d been playing too, which were part of that lad mag era. I was very much a part of it, but I wasn’t happy and I didn’t feel a part of it,” he says.  

“I just knew that it was time for me. 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.”  

What did he learn? 

“I learnt that I had a lot of abandonment issues, daddy issues and why that was making me press the fucking button. You sit in a circle, and you talk about the shit that’s happened throughout your life.”

The actor’s father walked out on his young family when Dyer was just nine, after having a two-year affair and heading up a secret second family with two daughters. 

“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.” 

He adds: “I did discover a lot of things like meditation that helped to calm me down because I’ve got a crazy brain. I think we all have. And when you’ve got a crazy brain in the public eye, it sometimes feels like the media can’t wait for the fucking downfall. We’ve seen it with Amy Winehouse and people like that. They’ll tell her she’s a genius and then, when she starts showing a few flaws, they want to attack her for it. I met her a few times, and she was an incredible character. Look at that devastating end. I didn’t want to be that. I absolutely would have died if I didn’t go. I had kids, so I made sure I did change it around, and I’m so proud of myself for doing that, you know, and I’m a much better person on the other side.” 

Though his hard-living days are now behind him, Dyer is something of an anomaly in that he still drinks. “I think my problem was I had a really good capacity for drinking and taking drugs,” he says. “It wasn’t like I was doing anything violent or anything destructive in that way. I never blacked out. I just wanted to just sort of understand what was going wrong with me and why I was doing it to excess,” he explains. 

“And what they say in the 12-step programme is that you make amends to the people you hurt around you. 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.’ 

“That was the catalyst for me to go, ‘OK.’ And we did. We went on holiday and it was the best holiday we’ve ever had. We took the kids to Florida. It was actually the year when Dani won Love Island.” 

He adds: “My life has changed significantly. I’m not out and about fucking about. I have a little drink now and again. I’ve got a very close circle of people around me that don’t take drugs really. It’s all very relaxed and calm, and listen, me and my missus were drinking snowballs at Christmas. So that’s what I’ve become. Sitting there with a little fucking red cherry in your snowball, and sort of getting pissed on the snowballs.” 

There’s also the small matter of being patriarch to his burgeoning brood. He’s now a father of three and grandfather to the same amount. His oldest daughter, Dani, a TV personality in her own right, has three children, including twins with West Ham star Jarrod Bowen. As he mentioned during hosting duties at the Rolling Stone UK Awards in November 2025, it’s a “right fucking touch” to be married to the captain of your own team. But familial bliss is now the order of the day. 

“Me and my missus were sitting the other day and just looking at the destruction in our house from our three grandkids running around smashing stuff up,” he says. 

“I said to her, ‘This is all because me and you decided to get together in 1993. These human beings are running around because of us.’ It’s amazing. It’s fucking beautiful and I’m very grateful for them.” 

And, besides, there’s only so much time for a night on the tiles when Dyer uses his spare time to build “a little model Japanese bookstore”, the natural progression from his Lego obsession. 

“It’s really tricky, though,” he grins. “And because I’m so busy when I’ve got my downtime, it’s like, ‘Oh, I can’t be fucked going to it.’” 

He’s also best mates with his dad and will give him away as his best man when Dyer Sr gets married later this year at the age of 70. 

“He’s getting married in the Isle of Dogs. He’s got the church sorted, and there’s a little boozer round the corner,” he reveals. He wants it low key, but I’m gonna take him up Savile Row and get him a suit. He won’t have it, but I want to do that for him. Getting married at 70 is fucking mental, but I find it quite cute and touching that he’s fucked his other relationships up and is now ready to settle down,” he says. 

“It’s been a process, but he is my best mate now. I trust him, I confide in him and he talks a lot of sense. Everything that has happened between us is water off a duck’s back.” 

Up next for Dyer, then, is a newly released Sky documentary with his daughter Dani, where they’re attempting to bring back the great British caravanning holiday as the pair attempt to revive holiday parks and relive the joy of Dyer’s childhood. Think Clarkson’s Farm down by the seaside and you’re halfway there. It has already been recommissioned for a second series. “Something about that, and the characters down there, just really warmed my cockles,” he reflects.  

And later this year comes his most serious part to date, as Trevor Lock, the heroic real-life copper who played a key role in facing off against terrorists in the 1985 Iranian Embassy Siege.

“I feel like I want to direct something soon too,” he adds. “I’m at that era of my life. There’s a couple of things knocking about, but I’m really busy. It feels like my chance to give back, though. I want to cast a load of kids from council estates, raw as fuck and go, ‘Right, let’s play.’ That would be rewarding, to give back a bit of what I’ve got.” 

And, it’s fair to say, it would be a chance for this now national treasure to pass his well-earned jewels to a new generation…

Taken from the April/May issue of Rolling Stone UK. Order your print copy here.

Styling by Annabel Lucey
Grooming by Shanice Noel at Stella Creative Artists using Bumble & Bumble and Charlotte Tilbury
Digital retouching: Adam Lupton (@RetouchedByAdam) and Lex O’Neill (@RetouchedByLex)