by Joe Allan
In 1996, Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s novel, Trainspotting, picked up on this latter theme, and had been a runaway box-office hit in UK cinemas, becoming the highest grossing British film of the year and thrusting Boyle, as well as most of the film’s cast, onto the international stage. In The Films of Danny Dyer, Danny recalls, ‘Trainspotting had been out, and I remember being fascinated by that film and just how raw it was.’ Yet he didn’t relate to the lives of the film’s main characters, strung out on heroine and out of control: ‘Of course the idea of smack and the dark, underground, weird world that these smackheads live in was fascinating, but I’m not part of that.’ Luckily for Danny, someone else was similarly inspired by Boyle’s frank and unfiltered view of the state of modern Britain.
Justin Kerrigan had just turned twenty-five when he began on Human Traffic, his feature film debut, and he was determined the film would be a true insight into a world he knew well. He hoped it would reflect not only what was going on in his Cardiff hometown, but in virtually every city, town and village across the country. He told Guardian journalist Mark Morris, at the time of the film’s release, ‘We’re talking about a massive mainstream youth culture. It’s the biggest youth culture in the history of Britain [and] we don’t have any filmic representation of it.’ Everyone in Kerrigan’s script was an extension of his own personality – he literally was all of the characters. While impressed by Trainspotting, Kerrigan’s main aim was to avoid the browbeating and moral judgement running through Boyle’s film. As Peter Bradshaw commented in his Guardian review at the time, ‘No one gets to climb out of a lavatory; there are no crisis scenes … They do drugs; they have a fantastic time; that’s it.’
Danny recalls in his interview with Sothcott and Mullinger that it was this uncomplicated and previously undocumented truth that grabbed his attention: ‘[It was great] to read something so honest, so brutally honest, with no moral ending. It is just about a group of people going out [and] getting f****d up. They’ve got s**t jobs, getting off their nut, bit of a comedown, roll credits. I just thought that was so great, I’d never read anything like it.’ He appreciated that the script ‘was stating the fact that millions of people take drugs, and they take drugs because they want to, and the majority of people have a f*****g good time’.
For Danny, the stakes going into his Human Traffic audition were probably the highest he would ever face in his professional life: it was for his first film, he was desperate for work and failure may have seen him quit acting for good. He knew he could play this character, he knew Moff, he had lived Moff; he was sure he could pull it off. In the end, the audition turned out to be the nearest thing to a certainty that Danny would ever experience. He recalled in an interview with the Guardian: ‘That audition is the only one I ever had where the first question was, “Do you take drugs?” I said, “Yes, I love drugs.” They were like, “Perfect.”’
Kerrigan’s insistence that his actors needed to have experienced drugs to fully understand the world the characters inhabited meant he would scare off a few established actors nervous about controversy or a tabloid backlash. Back then, as much as today, controversy was not something that worried Danny. He had very little to lose in terms of his professional reputation, and he had it all to gain in making the biggest splash possible with his first major screen role. He was on song during the reading, and even managed to persuade Kerrigan he would be better playing Moff in his own accent, rather than attempting the Welsh accent in the script. Kerrigan hired Danny and rewrote the character to explain Moff’s displacement from London to Cardiff.
The filming took place mostly in Cardiff, and the set became the hub for an extended, six-week party. Danny became so fully immersed in the character, insisting authenticity was key to his performance, that he was more or less living as Moff for the entire shoot. His time away from home was, for him, a welcome break from the pressures and routines of family life, but for Joanne it couldn’t have been so easy. Danny admits he cut himself off from reality while on location. Cardiff was, as it is now, a buzzing party town, acting as a major distraction and an oasis of pleasure to the surrounding towns and villages, and the crew took full advantage of what was on offer. What ensued was six weeks of debauchery, with Danny not paying much attention to his spending or worrying about what was going on with his young family back in London.
The extremely tight budget on the picture meant the script was constantly changing in order to accommodate compromises of scale and cuts enforced by the film’s producers and financial backers. Everyone involved was working hard, but they were also playing hard. Danny told Sothcott and Mullinger, ‘In all honesty, I owed them money by the end of the job … I’d [spent] all my wages.’ It was unlikely Joanne saw the funny side when Danny eventually returned home from Cardiff with little to show for his time away.
John Simm could be considered the star of the film – he was red-hot after a memorable turn in Cracker and his first lead role in the BBC’s The Lakes – but in truth the film was a real ensemble piece, with each of the main cast enjoying some unforgettable moments. As filming started, Danny was proving to be a big hit with the creative team. He explained in The Films of Danny Dyer, ‘I had the best part and I knew that, and I knew that when I got it, so I just knew that I had to work hard.’ Danny illustrated this in his film-stealing scene as a passenger in a cab, manic and off his face on speed, talking about the film Taxi Driver to his driver. It was in this scene a movie star was born.
Human Traffic was a real education for Danny – a catalogue of firsts, and none more memorable than his first sex scene … well, almost. In one classic sequence, Moff is caught masturbating by his mother as she enters his bedroom without him realizing. It was an experience he would never forget. On seeing the final scene in the cinema, in the presence of his mum and grandma, he joked in his autobiography, ‘I’ve had more comfortable evenings at the cinema, let me tell you.’
Joanne travelled to Cardiff to join Danny for the last couple of days on set. He neglected to mention what had happened to the £3,000 he had been paid for the job until they got home, as he was afraid to tell Joanne it had more or less covered his bar bill at the hotel. Joanne was understandably upset and Danny returned to London in a slightly worse financial shape than when he left. But he knew he had played his part in making something special and could claim a large proportion of the credit for the film’s eventual success. He said in The Films of Danny Dyer, ‘I was proud of my performance. I really felt I stood out … I was just proud to be in it, because I knew that if this movie had come out and I hadn’t been in it, it would have been a film I’d love to have seen.’
The road to the film’s completion and release was a long and fraught one. Wrangles with the producers and months of re-recording lost dialogue meant the film didn’t hit UK cinemas until almost two years after wrapping principal photography. Much of the tabloid controversy that then followed the film’s release in 1999 was directed at the seemingly carefree and ubiquitous drug use in the film. Although there are no scenes of anyone actually taking drugs, the implied actions of the characters seemed irresponsible and reckless to anyone over a certain age and, apparently, the average broadsheet film reviewer. At the time, Kerrigan defended the film in the Guardian: ‘If the film’s controversial, that means that life’s controversial.’ Danny was quoted in the same article as saying, ‘A lot of people ain’t going to like it. If they want to do a live debate programme on it, I’m prepared to go on. This film shows the way it is, every weekend.’ Perhaps, considering the trouble Danny’s opinions and unedited comments have since got him into, it’s just as well this televised debate never happened. Yet the film did cause discussion and put casual drug use, particularly ecstasy, into a number of tabloid headlines and, subsequently, onto several political agendas.
Like Trainspotting before it, the film touched a nerve with its intended audience and became a reasonable box office success, making nearly £2.5 million in the UK and later becom
ing a big DVD seller. Danny looks back on Human Traffic fondly in Sothcott and Mullinger’s book, recognizing its importance in his career. ‘I think that a lot of people have forgotten about Human Traffic . . . [but] it still has got its cult following . . . I always love it when people do come up and talk about Human Traffic, but it is a rare thing.’ He concluded, ‘I think it made people stand up and pay attention to me . . . I was young . . . It was the start of my journey, so it’s always going to be close to my heart.’ In true Danny Dyer fashion, he joked, ‘It was certainly a good way of telling my parents that I take drugs.’
Danny’s wait for his next movie job was agonizingly long. Despite knowing he had done good work on Human Traffic, the film would not be seen by anyone inside or outside the industry for some time. Danny returned to labouring work, but with a new confidence and now fully assured, after his experience on the film, that it was just a matter of time before he would be working full time as an actor again. He kept in practice by taking stage work, but as soon as the buzz started to build about his performance in Human Traffic, the phone started ringing again. He would soon work with some of the most talented directors and writers in British independent cinema, be offered a variety of unexpected and challenging roles and enjoy an eclectic start to his film career.
Danny’s next film, The Trench, was the directorial debut of the acclaimed best-selling novelist, William Boyd, and brought together another young and inexperienced ensemble cast. The main character was portrayed by Paul Nicholls, who had come to fame playing Joe Wicks in EastEnders, and was now reaping the rewards of leaving the show on a high. However, he struggled to cope with the fame and unwanted paparazzi attention and disliked the ‘teen pin-up’ status thrust upon him by his exposure on the soap, and was looking for a change of scene.
Like Danny, Nicholls was a working-class kid from a single-parent family, having grown up in Bolton in the north of England, and came to acting after showing exceptional promise at a young age. The pair had plenty in common and bonded quickly on The Trench’s set. Danny was a couple of years older than Paul, but as a relative unknown at this stage, he could only imagine the pressures his new friend was facing. It’s likely that Nicholls’ discomfort over intrusions into his private life acted as a cautionary tale for Danny – it may even have delayed his decision to join the soap for several years after he was first approached.
Nicholls also wanted to be taken seriously as an actor, and both he and Danny realized the script for The Trench – set in the trenches of the First World War – was worth fighting for. Danny had been told he would be up for the part of Victor Dell, a loud-mouthed lad with a gift for the banter and plenty of swagger – obviously, his bread and butter. In the end, Dell cracks under the strain of impending attack and is revealed to be a coward, sobbing as he is forced to climb out of the trench during battle. In the film’s DVD extras, Danny says, ‘I read the script and I loved it. Just loved the fact that they were so young and vulnerable.’ He explained that he was particularly drawn to his character, saying, ‘He’s the bad one in the bunch, really; it’s a good character. He’s a bit wild, a bit of a nutter … and he’s cockney as well, surprisingly.’ Although the role seemed tailor-made for him, Danny had to audition several times before he finally got the part.
The rest of the cast now looks like a who’s who of the best of British film and television acting, featuring several faces who would go on to become household names, including Daniel Craig, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw and James D’Arcy. The Trench was an unusual take on the events that took place immediately prior to the infamous Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest and most shocking chapter in the British military’s attempts to halt the advancing German army during the First World War. The film is set in one small stretch of a British trench during the forty-eight hours before the troops went ‘over the top’ to face almost certain death, focusing on a company of mostly teenage volunteers as they go about their daily routine, unaware of what was to come.
Once casting was complete, the boys were gathered, as one group, for rehearsal and a read-through of the script. This is always a tense moment for everyone: the cast and crew’s first chance to see if all the individual personalities would fuse. Thankfully, the cast began to gel very quickly, mirroring the friendships and bonds shared by their characters in the film. This camaraderie would be one of the most enjoyable elements in the finished film.
Writer and director William Boyd suggested several books for the actors to read as research, determined the young cast should be well versed in the history of the First World War and fully aware of the hardships endured by the soldiers who fought in it. This included collections of poetry inspired by the events of the war and journals written by the soldiers themselves. Danny recalls in an interview for Sothcott and Mullinger’s title, ‘It was the first time I had had to do research for a role. [Boyd] gave me these books of poetry by Wilfred Owen. So I was really starting to get a bit more professional, a bit more into it ... I read dozens of books about the First World War and the Battle of the Somme.’ Nicholls stated on the film’s DVD extras, ‘Obviously, you never know, however many books you read, what it felt like in the trench, and to not have slept for three days; so cold that you can’t feel your fingers, so hungry that you’d eat anything . . . You can imagine what those things are like if you’ve got a great imagination, but you can never really get there.’
It would seem Boyd agreed with Nicholls and decided he would have to raise the stakes in order for the actors to feel fully immersed in their roles. Boyd commented, ‘We felt it would be really useful to give them just the briefest inkling of what it was like to be in a trench, to sleep out under the stars, to be cold, bored rigid, to be a bit terrified, fed up and hungry.’ Thus, the entire cast was told they would be staying out overnight, with everyone assuming it must be a bonding evening in a nearby hotel. Instead, they were shipped off to spend the night sleeping rough in a replica trench in a First World War re-enactment site in Basildon, on the outskirts of London. Boyd justified these extreme measures, reasoning, ‘I think that they all knew that it was kind of a test and an opportunity to build up a store of memories and experiences which when they came to the set, or when they came to film or act, they could draw on, because they all had to do sentry duty, they all had to fill sand bags, crawl out in the night on their bellies into the dark Essex countryside. It was real, so when it came to the extraordinary artificiality and oddness of a movie set, they knew what they were being asked to do. It was very valuable.’
Valuable maybe, but this level of ‘method’ acting was not something Danny was particularly happy about, as he recollected in his autobiography. ‘The trench was set up and they started setting off fireworks to try and recreate the terror of the whole thing. To be honest, I started to get the pox with it.’ In the movie’s DVD special features, Danny explained, ‘They just chucked us in this trench at seven o’clock at night until seven o’clock the next day and we had to live like [the characters]. [I] got a feel of it then, sleeping outside, freezing my nuts off – we didn’t know what was going on – eating this stew with mud in it, grit in my teeth, and then we had to clean the bowl with bread and [then put] peaches in after. It was heavy. We had nothing to eat all day. It hit me hard.’ So hard, in fact, that, following the discovery that one of the other actors had left the trench and returned to London, he and Paul Nicholls jumped ship – in full First World War uniforms and carrying all of their kit! The pair hiked across fields to the nearest train station and headed back to Nicholls’ flat in Kilburn. Because neither of them had any cash, they blagged their way onto the train and jumped the barriers at the other end. While this was nothing out of the ordinary for Danny, Nicholls struggled to get through the barrier without being caught and was held by station staff, resulting in both actors having to give their details to the police. With Nicholls as famous as he was at the time, the story made the papers and would serve as one of the first of many brushes Danny would have with the British tablo
id press.
Boyd was understandably annoyed at the behaviour of two of his key cast members, but Danny revealed in his book, ‘I explained to him that trench life wasn’t doing nothing for me and I promised I wouldn’t let him down on the job,’ telling his director, ‘You watch. I’ll come through for you.’ Danny was true to his word and delivered a strong performance, making the transition from know-it-all to snivelling coward with ease. While the former may not have been much of a stretch, he gives a compelling turn as the latter.
Danny’s best scene saw him squaring off with the then unknown Daniel Craig. In an encounter near the end of the film, Danny’s character has been caught by Craig’s Sergeant Winter, drunk on the platoon’s rum rations and afraid to join his fellow soldiers in the march across no man’s land. Winter berates the soldier for his cowardice and uses his boot to push Danny’s face into a muddy puddle, trying to drown him. It’s a powerful scene and Danny holds his own against the famously intense and physical acting style of the future James Bond.