The actor has always been full of surprises – and now thanks to Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster he’s become a romantic lead. As the series returns, he talks about marriage, masculinity and meditation
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anny Dyer is dressed in white and carrying a huge bouquet of flowers when I drop in on his Guardian photoshoot. “Hello, baby,” he says to me in a voice so bad-boy East End, so fabulously filthy, that he sounds like a parody of Danny Dyer. We’ve never met before, but you wouldn’t guess.
Dyer has been in the limelight for 30 years, but never like this. As he approaches 50, he has become a middle-aged heart-throb. The week we meet, he’s on the front of Rolling Stone UK, and he can’t quite believe it. “I’m on it now, as we speak. And the cover before was Timothée Chalamet! Pretty cool! You know, I’ve had a long career and I couldn’t get on the cover of anything till now.”
For much of his life, Dyer has been more infamous than famous, meat and drink to the redtop newspapers. Party animal? Tick. Boozer extraordinaire? Tick. Sex scandals? Tick. Dyer always provided good copy. But there was more to it than the debauchery. We rooted for him. For all his misdemeanours, he was still with his childhood sweetheart Jo, whom he started dating aged 13. For all his political incorrectness, he was politically astute. And for every public tumble off the rails, there was an equally compelling performance: on stage, as a protege of great East End playwright Harold Pinter; on screen, as Moff, a motor-mouthed trouble-maker in the rave culture comedy-drama Human Traffic; and on TV, as family man and pink-dressing-gowned grafter Mick Carter, landlord of EastEnders’ Queen Vic.
