EXCLUSIVE: “It’s good to feel like you have range, which is something I’ve never been acknowledged for,” Danny Dyer told Deadline as he reacted to his first ever BAFTA nom and a double award win for Disney+ hit Rivals.
Known for portraying ‘hard men’ and for performances in the likes of The Football Factory and EastEnders, along with hosting a hit podcast with his daughter, Dyer has been in something of a purple patch of late.
He won RTS and BPG awards for his role as Freddie Jones in Rivals and has been recognized by BAFTA for a different show, Sky’s Mr Bigstuff, where he is up for Male Performance in a Comedy against the likes of Kaos’ Nabhaan Rizwan and Smoggie Queens lead Phil Dunning.
“Arguably these two jobs were my best work to date,” said Dyer. “I’ve done films back to back that were sh*te and you lose a bit of momentum. But I can say ‘no’ to stuff now. I have that luxury.”
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In Rivals, Dyer plays a complex, nouveau riche tech entrepreneur who strikes up an unlikely romance with local author Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson).
Starring alongside big names like David Tennant and Aidan Turner, the 47-year-old said it came as a “surprise” when he began garnering awards attention. “He’s a lovely character but the other leads give such powerful performances,” he added. “I didn’t think people would really get Freddie.”
The BAFTA jury didn’t quite get him either, choosing instead to reward Dyer for his comic performance as Lee in Ryan Sampson’s Mr Bigstuff, which has already been recommissioned. Dyer said he relished the opportunity to play a straight comedy character and, were he to win, he will dedicate the gong to Sampson. “I loved it,” he said of playing Sampson’s bombastic and estranged brother. “The thing about comedy is you play it straight, you don’t play it for the comedy. Ryan’s creation is dark and they are all very flawed characters, they are bullsh*tters lying to each other constantly during the show.”
Mr Bigstuff and Rivals both touch on masculinity, an issue that Dyer has been confronting down the decades with many of his characters, from The Football Factory’s Tommy Johnson to Jack in new Nick Love-directed movie Marching Powder.
Dyer reckons social media has been a big contributor to a modern-day masculinity crisis. “It’s a mad time to be alive,” he added. “There’s lots of anxiety around. I feel that social media has f***ked the planet up. As adults we are guilty of becoming avatars and not communicating or engaging with each other and we can’t take it back now so [social media is] definitely the frontrunner for why we’re all struggling with who we are and what we’re allowed to be.”
Love and Zygi Kamasa’s new distributor True Brit “rolled the dice” with the theme of the “ridiculousness of masculinity” in Marching Powder, Dyer said, which is about a middle aged, drug-taking football hooligan who is arrested and given six weeks to turn his life around, or else face a long spell in prison.
While “obviously the critics f***ing hated it,” Dyer revealed the movie is his most successful Box Office movie of all time, having grossed around £3M ($3.8M) so far. He and Love have some “really exciting stuff in the pipeline and have been set up for another chapter,” he added.
“At a time when cinema is dying on its arse, there was clearly an appetite and people wanted to go out and spend their money,” said Dyer. “We did this in a light-hearted comedy kind of way. It’s about a flawed character whose heart is in the right place.”
Speaking of critics, Dyer recently used an appearance on the podcast he hosts with daughter Dani Dyer to slam writers’ “backhanded” praise about his role in Rivals.
He blamed in part an inherent snobbery in the UK entertainment industry and issued a rallying cry for the young working class actors of the future.
“I started out in the 90s and came across classism quite early in my life and you have to get on with it,” he added. “I experienced it in the theater world and it drove me on and gave me ambition. We need young working class actors who are not academically strong and need to express themselves, and giving them a career in the arts is a perfect way to do that. I will be shouting from every hill that it’s OK to be working class and to be an actor.”
Harold Pinter “wanted me to be a bitter animal”
When starting out, Dyer became very close with iconic British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter, who had a huge influence on his career and gave him work in his plays.
On whether he’d be proud of the BAFTA nom, Dyer considered that Pinter, who died in 2008, would probably have wanted him to get back to the boards.
“Harold was very anti-establishment and that’s why I loved him,” said Dyer. “He was a bitter man and always wanted me to be a bitter animal. So I think he’d say, ‘Get back in the theater and f**k the awards because that’s where you’re best’.”
The post Danny Dyer Talks Confounding The Critics In ‘Rivals’, Why The UK Needs Working Class Actors & What His Old Friend Harold Pinter Would Have Made Of His First Ever BAFTA Nom appeared first on Deadline.
