by Joe Allan
Danny’s first audition went well and he got a call-back to sing and act in front of Mackintosh. Deciding he had nothing to lose, Danny embraced the opportunity, ignored the little voice inside his head telling him he couldn’t sing and gave it his all. Danny nailed it. Although he hadn’t actually been offered the role, he was confident he had done enough to secure it.
Shortly after the final meeting, Danny was invited to a party to drum up publicity for the launch of a new mobile phone. Keen to share one of the perks of being an actor with his family, he took Joanne along and after a few drinks, started to let his guard down. Talking to a girl who asked him what his next project was, Danny mentioned the Oliver! job and his dislike of the reality television method used to cast some of the roles. What Danny didn’t know was that the girl was a reporter and she was taping the conversation. His comments were reported in the Daily Mail the next day under the headline, ‘The “new Bill Sikes” would do ANYTHING to avoid Lloyd-Webber’s Nancys’, where he was quoted as saying, ‘I don’t fancy any of those Nancys, they’re all rubbish. It’s more like, “I’ll do anything to be on TV”.’ Needless to say, he instantly regretted the previous night’s conversation and was not in the least surprised when his agent called to tell him the Oliver! production team had been in touch and delivered an abrupt rejection.
Danny was understandably devastated. The experience would have been a different kind of challenge for him, and could have opened countless doors in the West End, as well as provided a route back into television and film. It was also very well-paid, regular work, and the show eventually ran for over eighteen months.
It was situations like these that prompted Danny to hire a full-time PR manager to look over his press statements and help him tone down any potentially inflammatory comments he might make. Unfortunately for Danny, a PR manager is not on call all the time, and he still managed to let the odd clanger slip through the net. It was one such slip-up that scuppered one of the earlier approaches made by the EastEnders production team the following year.
Danny had gone to the BBC offices in 2009 to meet with their head of drama. When he asked why he had never been offered parts in any BBC literary adaptations or period dramas, the producers admitted his name did come up quite often at casting meetings, only to be dismissed because he was perceived as primarily a movie actor and would most likely turn down any small-screen roles. Danny, in an interview with The Lady magazine, expressed his frustrations at these types of situation: ‘Sometimes your reputation precedes you, I suppose. That’s not a choice of mine.’
Back at the BBC, conversation turned to EastEnders and the idea of Danny joining the cast for a limited time. They pitched a character intended to shake up the show, one where the writers would work closely with the actor intending to play him, ensuring the part would be tailor-made for Danny, and thus giving him a unique opportunity to have greater creative input in the construction of his own role. It was obviously a tempting offer. What Danny didn’t expect was for the Sun the very next day to run a report stating he was in talks to join the soap, guaranteeing that a feeding-frenzy of speculation ensued. The massive intrusion into his family’s private lives, which went hand in hand with joining a hugely popular flagship television show, was understandably daunting. Initially, he was diplomatic about the idea of joining the series, but as press interest escalated and the question of joining EastEnders kept coming up, Danny began to feel hounded and his responses became a lot less tactful. In the end, he was widely reported as having said he would consider it when he was ‘fat, bald and fifty’. Obviously, this didn’t go down well with his agent or the BBC, and the offer quickly disappeared.
Danny has spoken honestly about the downside of fame and often stated he has wrestled with its double-edged nature. Danny does, however, have a very vocal and forthcoming fan base and he never assumes the worst of anyone who approaches him in public – he will always stop and chat to fans, sign autographs and pose for pictures – after all, his fans are the ones who stood by him when critics and the industry itself had deserted him and he is keen to give them something back. He is well aware that this lack of privacy is the obvious price of celebrity and it is only when it comes to his family that he regrets he has become such an accessible piece of public property.
His attitude towards his fame and the success he’s achieved is at odds with many people’s perception of him. Far from being egotistical and self-centred, Danny has always displayed a deep desire to gain respect and acknowledgement for his work from his peers, and his drive to keep working is not fuelled necessarily by ego, but from a need to prove something to himself about his own abilities and to provide a secure future for his family. People’s motives for working in an arena where celebrity and outside scrutiny are inevitable by-products are invariably complex and often contradictory – the actor who makes big-budget, commercial movies but complains about press intrusion and doesn’t want to take part in promotion – but Danny accepts it as a necessary evil. He rarely directly blames the press or tabloids for any of his own mishaps or misdemeanours, more likely to say he only has himself to blame. He has spent more than his fair share of time in the headlines, for things he hasn’t done as often as for things he has, but he never seems to let it get to him, and this attitude should be commended.
By this time, Danny was desperately trying to keep his career on track, but was fighting a losing battle to separate his public persona from the perception he was able to deliver a range of performances. For the next few years, he disappeared from mainstream films, seldom moving from within his comfort zone or challenging himself. With a steady stream of gangsters and hard-man roles and parts in several low-budget horror films, he was struggling to reach a wider audience. Sadly for Danny, his film career had reached a stalemate.
Danny retreated completely into the shadowy world of private investment projects and low-budget genre features. While working free from major studio interference, the world of independent film-making can be a breeding ground for innovators, but today it struggles to survive amid a climate of cutbacks and inadequate funding.
The process of raising the capital to make an independent film is often complicated. Money is the life-force for every venture and independent financers can be a ruthless breed who would see a made-for-DVD movie with a bankable star such as Danny as a sure-fire way to make a decent return on their investment. They are often given an executive producer credit on a film, and their desire to make a project profitable can extend from paying the actors a basic salary and rewriting scenes that seem too elaborate (and are therefore too expensive), to promoting the film in a misleading way via poster art or putting a famous actor, who might only appear in the film for five minutes, prominently on the sleeve designs of the DVD. Danny would fall victim to each of these ploys over the next few years, with the mis-selling of product to his fans becoming increasingly common practice.
The roles Danny was offered seemed to fall neatly into two distinct but very different categories. There were the low-budget British gangster films, where he might play a former villain trying to go straight or a regular man turned vigilante, invariably brandishing a gun on the poster or DVD cover artwork; or there were the even lower budget horror films that were a twist on the horror–comedy mash-up Danny had experienced on Severance. None of these were going to help Danny advance his career, and he was becoming increasingly downhearted and frustrated with the situation.
It became clear that Danny was guilty of underselling his own worth when choosing roles, saying yes to many projects that were not worthy of his talent and forgetting the financial boost his name could provide, part of the reason producers offered him these parts in the first place.
Around this time, Danny was approached for the lead role in a Sky television-produced adaptation of Martina Cole’s best-selling crime novel, The Take. The story of a dangerous sociopath who builds his own criminal empire, only to watch it crumble and destroy the lives of everyone around him, felt like a perfect
fit for Danny. It was a notch up from his recent output in terms of budget and production value, but he was ill-advised by those around him and turned it down. His team reasoned it was too much of a step back: he would be again playing on his old gangster persona and he should be starring in films rather than television miniseries. After Danny had pipped him at the post for The Football Factory, it was Tom Hardy’s turn to get one over on Danny. Hardy made the character his own, picking up several award nominations, and it would be his last television role as he moved on to a string of blockbuster movies including Inception, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Dark Knight Rises. While Danny has always been clear he makes his own career decisions, with his agents on hand to advise him, it would appear he was not being particularly well managed at this point.
Over the next couple of years, Danny became the go-to actor for low-budget British genre cinema, constantly working, but rarely making anything of quality and nothing which would survive outside the straight-to-DVD market.
By the time City Rats came along in 2008, Danny was desperate to be acting in something good, but was willing to settle for simply being good in something bad.
City Rats was a valiant, if misjudged, attempt by Danny to put a slightly different twist on a character he had played several times before – a young alcoholic with a violent past and connections to the criminal underworld – but one who strove to atone for his actions. Starring alongside his The Business co-star, Tamer Hassan, the film, set in London, contained interlocking stories involving a set of very different, but ultimately all fairly clichéd, characters. While aiming for Pulp Fiction’s story structure, the film fell flat on almost every level. The script was underdeveloped and amateurish, saddled with Hassan’s obvious struggle to be a convincing leading man in what was a fairly challenging and dramatic role. The picture aims to shock, but ends up forced and unconvincing in its attempts to tackle controversial issues.
City Rats was a game-changer for Danny in the sense that it would become a major success on DVD, having been misrepresented as a gangster film reunion between Danny and Hassan. From then on, DVD distribution company Revolver became the ‘home of Danny Dyer films’ and insisted on packaging virtually every one of his DVDs in a variation of the same design. They would feature a grainy image of the actor, sometimes taken from a different film, with the standard black, white and red colour scheme that was now the pattern for gritty British gangster films. It would set a worrying precedent for the rest of Danny’s film career and one that would become a major problem in terms of disappointing his most loyal fans. The issue wasn’t restricted to his new films, as distributors picked up anything associated with Danny to repackage their existing catalogues and repromoted several older films in a similarly misleading fashion.
One of the worst cases of this was 2009’s Malice in Wonderland. An ambitious but deeply flawed effort to subvert and modernize the classic Alice in Wonderland stories, it features Danny as a human version of the time-obsessed White Rabbit, transformed into a fast-talking, streetwise taxi driver who tries to help Maggie Grace’s Alice with good advice and, more typically, some non-prescribed pharmaceutical guidance. Way too scary (and sweary) for kids and similarly too silly for adults, it’s hard to see who the target audience was for this picture. In Danny’s defence, it was a decent and slightly different role for him – acting as a Good Samaritan – that must have read well in its original script form. However, time and budget restrictions meant that getting the film-makers’ original vision onto the screen was virtually impossible. A DVD cover with an image of bullet holes in glass (in the required red, black and white colours) gave no indication of the film’s fairy-tale origins.
Dead Man Running was a simple race-against-time thriller, with Danny and Tamer Hassan playing a pair of lovable rogues using every dodgy contact and breaking every law in the book when they are given just twenty-four hours to pay off a debt they owe to an American loan shark, played by rapper 50 Cent. While this feels more like a true reteaming of the double act that had worked so well in Nick Love’s The Business, the pair’s chemistry was not enough to elevate the film’s flimsy plot and overall amateurish execution.
Throughout the film, Danny looks tired, most likely due to the fact he was, more or less, shooting movie after movie over the period of a couple of years. Danny’s way of working would see him map out a schedule of several films where he would play first or second lead, and then he would slot in as many cameos or appearance favours as possible in between. In the years 2008 to 2010, Danny was involved in making close to fifteen films, with nine projects released in 2009 alone. Towards the end of this prolific run, Danny was virtually on autopilot, and it’s hard to differentiate the characters he plays in any of these movies. While finding a niche and playing to an established fan base can be very profitable, it’s not something anyone hoping for the respect of their peers as a versatile actor would welcome.
For Danny, it was a trap, and although he admits he had a hand in making it, he was finding it hard to escape. Talking about being typecast to The Lady magazine, Danny explained the tightrope he was forced to walk: ‘It’s tricky. I have a job I love to do . . . Because of who I am or where I am from it has helped me get roles, but it has hindered me in some respects.’ He remained optimistic, saying, ‘You can’t have it all your own way . . . As long as I keep working and it is good stuff and I feel like I can shine in it, then I am happy. But of course, I want to do period dramas and do things [out of my comfort zone] that make people go, “Wow”. I am a serious actor and I am not just some cockney wideboy.’ He concluded, ‘There are some people out there who love me and really get me and there are some people who despise me and never give me the time of day without even meeting me.’
2009’s Jack Said was a definite low point, as Danny found himself involved in a sequel to a film, Jack Says, that had made no money, but had a team of producers and a lead actor who were obviously desperate to make a name for themselves in the film industry. The fact that the producers were auctioning roles in the film to the highest bidders on eBay, and one of the lead actors in the film was a lottery winner who paid £20,000 to star in it, should have been a clue as to the depths to which he had sunk. By now, Danny had started to think, ‘head down and get on with the job at hand’, remembering there was a pay cheque at the end.
Danny was handed another source of easy income when he was asked to write a weekly column for Zoo magazine. Zoo had launched in 2006, riding the wave of other successful ‘lads’ mag’ titles popular at the time. With their mix of football news, half-naked women and bawdy humour, the culture surrounding these magazines found its epitome in Danny. However, he saw it merely as a tool for free publicity, an easy way to promote his own films and personal appearances. His picture appeared at the top of the page and the content was largely light-hearted articles written in his ‘cockney geezer’ banter, some of which he supplied during weekly phone calls with staff writers at the magazine.
One particular issue, published in May 2010, included a reader’s problems column, with Danny acting as the ‘agony uncle’ and supplying the solutions. Answering one reader’s letter enquiring about what he should do after splitting with his girlfriend, the advice given was to ‘[Go] out on a rampage with the boys, getting on the booze and smashing anything that moves’, adding, ‘Of course, the other option is to cut your ex’s face, and then no one will want her.’ Understandably, there was a huge outcry as the story was picked up by the British press, and several domestic abuse charities, especially those dealing specifically with violence against women, took to every public forum available to condemn Danny’s words and demand an apology. The Guardian quoted Ceri Goddard, a spokesperson for the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading organization campaigning for female equality, as saying, ‘I can only assume that Dyer thought he was being ironic. But I would like him to explain that to a woman who is a victim of violence. I am worried that this does show an attitude that jokes about violence against women [being]
fair game.’
Danny was soon trending on Twitter – for all the wrong reasons. It was an exceptionally tough time for him: hounded by the media, he tried desperately to tell his side of the story and set the record straight. Talking to the Independent, he said, ‘Even as [the comment] came out of my mouth I wasn’t proud of it ... But I never thought for a minute they’d stick it in the magazine.’ He asserted he made the remark – actually a paraphrased quote from one of his films – as an off-the-record joke over the phone, and revealed he had never even met the journalists he spoke to at Zoo. Danny told the Sun newspaper, ‘This is totally out of order, I am totally devastated’, claiming, ‘I have been completely misquoted. This is not the advice I would give any member of the public, I do not condone violence against women.’ He continued to the Independent, ‘It just makes me feel sick that people would believe that I’m a misogynist . . . especially with two daughters and having been brought up by women. I adore women . . . I love everything about them.’ All over the internet, the story kept on going and nothing Danny did could stem the flow of negativity towards him. He spoke out repeatedly against being unjustly branded as a woman-hater and denied strenuously any suggestions he himself would ever consider violence against women as justifiable, but it was to no avail.
He was left high and dry by Zoo. The immediate repercussions saw Danny dropped from the magazine as they issued a statement contradicting his account of how the column had come to be printed, citing a production error rather than an editorial decision. He told the Guardian he thought Zoo were using the storm of bad publicity as a means to an end, taking advantage of the controversy as a way to drop him from the magazine. He speculated, ‘Maybe they thought it was funny, or they were sick of paying me two grand a pop for a column I never wrote.’ The damage caused to Danny’s reputation was fairly catastrophic. Once a mainstay of daytime television chat shows, the fallout only served to push him further away from the mainstream audience he so desperately wanted to engage. It was a hard lesson to learn, but he remains philosophical about it, telling the Independent, ‘I think the mistake I made was getting involved with a magazine like Zoo in the first place . . . It’s a publication that’s about being [laddish] in the extreme. That’s what they wanted from me . . . I trusted them.’ He then admitted, ‘I sold out. I should never have got involved in it.’