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Danny 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.

None of this, though, could prepare us for his reinvention as a romcom hero and Britain’s most unlikely national treasure. It’s thanks to the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s bonkbuster Rivals. Dyer plays self-made electronics mogul Freddie Jones, a moral beacon in a world of bastards, double-crossers and priapic bed-hoppers. In series one, with his 1980s-style ’tash, shaggy bob, soft belly and even softer heart, he showed us what it was like to be a real man. An issue that Dyer himself has been battling with for much of his life.

* * *

We meet to chat at a pub round the corner from the shoot. We’re in a trendy part of corporate east London, but the pub feels like a relic from the East End Dyer grew up in. Basic and barely furnished, the most gastro thing on offer is a bag of cheddar and onion crisps. He orders a lager, and we settle down in a corner. “This is a nice boozer, to be fair. Right up my street,” he says.

It’s hard to keep up with Dyer, he’s got so many projects on the go. As well as Rivals, there’s the Sky reality show The Dyers’ Caravan Park, in which he and his daughter, Dani, attempt to manage the Priory Hill caravan park on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent; One Last Deal, a single-actor thriller about a football agent on his uppers; The Siege, a Channel 4 drama he’s currently shooting about the six-day standoff at the Iranian embassy in 1980; Nobody’s Fool, a new Traitors-esque ITV gameshow with Rivals co-star Emily Atack … and on it goes. He’s had to call a halt to Live and Let Dyers, the podcast he co-hosted with Dani, because there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.

To be fair, Dyer has always put a shift in. You won’t find him talking about the art or his technique; it’s always the job and the money. You sense he remembers how much he’s been paid for every bit of work, whether it’s a gameshow (£100k for The Wall), EastEnders (about £250,000 a year) or Who Do You Think You Are?, in which he discovered he was related to Thomas Cromwell and Edward III. “I got 18 grand for that. I don’t really give a fuck about my distant relatives, but the money was good. I think the producers were more impressed that I was related to the king than me. I was more impressed with Cromwell, because he was working class.”

Occasionally, he’ll contribute to a classic, as with Who Do You Think You Are? And is the case with Rivals. In fact, he more than contributes. Dyer’s Freddie is the heartbeat of the show, and increasingly so in the second series, where the big question is whether Freddie and sweet, brow-beaten love interest Lizzie will get together. Dyer isn’t giving anything away. “I don’t want to do no spoilers, but Lizzie asks him if he wants to come in for fish fingers.” He stops, worried he’s already said too much. “That’s not a euphemism.”

Freddie is so different from most of Dyer’s characters. He’s still best known for self-destructive brutes such as Tommy Johnson in 2004’s The Football Factory and Jack in 2025’s Marching Powder. In both films, directed by Nick Love, he plays a football hooligan. Dyer says that they shot two different endings for The Football Factory. In one, Tommy, having been savagely beaten and his friend Zeberdee killed, walks away from the violence. In the final version, Tommy asks himself: “After all that, you really do have to ask yourself if it was all worth it?” before answering: “Course it fucking was!” I tell him I wish they’d stuck with the first ending.

“With these films, we’re not saying it’s right or wrong, we’re just highlighting it,” he says. “We’re saying this shit happens, it’s tribalism, it’s disenfranchised youth. There’s something about men getting together and drinking. There’s violence in the air.” Dyer insists these characters have never glamorised violence, but I’m not so sure. Marching Powder feels as if it’s at least part inspired by his own life. Middle-aged Jack’s cocaine-fuelled hedonism threatens his marriage. Dyer thinks the film should not have focused so much on hooliganism. “It dropped off when it was about the football violence, because I felt this was more about a man who was wrapped up in addiction patterns trying to save his marriage. We made a mistake in focusing so much on the violence.” Then again, he says, what does he know. It turned out to be his most profitable movie. “Critically it got ruined. I knew it would. We wasn’t making it for the critics. But it’s my biggest success to date. We took over £3m at the box office. Unheard of for one of my films to have taken that sort of money.”

Marching Powder feels horribly resonant in a country where football violence is on the rise (an 18% increase in the number of reported incidents in matches across England and Wales in 2024/25, compared with 2023/24); the teachers’ union, NASUWT, recently warned of a “masculinity crisis” in UK schools where almost a quarter of female teachers reported misogynistic attacks from pupils; and the Tate brothers are regarded as role models by many boys and young men.

His 12-year-old son, Arty, named after the Sopranos’ Artie Bucco, plays Jack’s son in Marching Powder. Dyer says he worries for him growing up in today’s climate where kids are thinking with AI rather than their brains. “We’re regressing. Back in the day, if you didn’t know something you couldn’t just punch it into a phone and find out the answer. It just makes us fucking lazy, you know what I mean? It’s detrimental for society and for our brains.”

So how does he encourage Arty to get off his phone? “I do as much as I can with him. We go out on our bikes together. And I’ve taught him to play chess. I have to let him win, because he’s such a bad loser.” But he admits it’s a struggle. “Now the kids sit indoors on a beautiful day playing games. There’s no incentive to go out now, and knock on your mate’s door. They can communicate in their headphones all day long in their house, shooting shit, and this is what we have to adapt to as parents.”

When Dyer was growing up on an estate in Custom House, east London, his first love was football. It still is. He is a West Ham devotee. Much to his delight, last year Dani married club captain Jarrod Bowen. Dyer has said that he probably loves Bowen more than Dani does. At 48, he is a grandfather of three (Dani and Jarrod have two-year-old twin daughters, Summer and Star; her five-year-old son, Santiago, is from a previous relationship).

He is so famous for playing football hooligans, I wonder if he ever was one. “Nah, was I fuck. I was fascinated by it as a child and I knew people who were, but no.” Do people assume he was? “Probably – that’s what fame is, isn’t it? People have a perception of you because of what they’ve seen you in.” Growing up, there were two tough schools opposite each other, and rival gangs were always kicking off. “There was lot of fighting.” Was he involved? “Not really, because I could make people laugh. I felt that was a power. And if you’ve got the hardest kids on side, you don’t need to fight.”

The young Dyer had a messy childhood. When he was nine, his father left home for another woman. It turned out he had a secret family with her, and had been managing the two in tandem. Although his relationship with his father has recovered recently (he now calls him his “best mate”), for decades they didn’t talk. The man he knew as his maternal grandad (his mother’s stepfather) became a father figure, but he died when Dyer was young. He began to believe that all the men he relied on in his life would walk out on him or die.

Dyer has done plenty of therapy, talks freely now about his abandonment issues, and believes that his fear of losing loved ones explains much of his self-destructive behaviour. Remarkably, he and Jo are still together – 36 years and three children on, and 10 years into their marriage.

He admits it’s not been easy for her. In 2000, she kicked him out of their home and briefly denied him access to Dani after he had high-profile affairs. They lived apart for almost three years. When they reconciled, it was on very different terms. For one thing, Jo controlled the family finances. Dyer not only thinks he’s lucky that Jo let him back into her life, he still can’t believe they got together in the first place. “She was the fittest girl in the school, and she didn’t talk to me for two years. She was the dancer and really smart, and everything I wasn’t. I was the scruffy kid, single-parent family, free school dinners. She came from a loving home, she was the best at everything. Back in the day, I had no hope of everything. I didn’t feel comfortable in my skin. I was fucking around, I was stealing a lot of stuff, I was smoking weed.”

So what happened? “We was in the same drama class. I was really good at drama and I think that maybe turned her on a bit. All of a sudden she asked me out on a date in the third year. I couldn’t fucking believe it. None of the school could believe it, either. Even now, we’re still opposites, complete chalk and cheese. We went to Pizza Hut and she had to pay for it because I had no money. She bought me a cappuccino and I felt so posh, and that was the start of our very, very long relationship.”

Some of Dyer’s best performances have been as himself in documentaries and reality shows. Last year, he was wonderful in The Assembly, an ITV show in which celebrities are interviewed by autistic, neurodivergent and learning disabled people. Dyer was warm, funny and self-laceratingly honest when quizzed. “I really enjoyed The Assembly. There’s no filter. There’s no bollocks in the room. I’d like to see Keir Starmer on there. I’d like to see people who need to be held to account, because you can’t talk in riddles on The Assembly. Starmer’s very good at talking and you learn fuck all from what’s he said. It’s an art.”

Nobody says it as it is like Danny Dyer. Perhaps most memorably he nailed David Cameron for Brexit in a way that the cleverest political commentators couldn’t begin to. In June 2018, two years after Cameron’s ill-conceived referendum resulted in Britain voting to leave the EU, Dyer took the former PM to task on a live TV show. “So what’s happened to that twat David Cameron who called it on? Let’s be fair … how comes he can scuttle off? Where is he?” Dyer asked. “He’s in Europe, in Nice, with his trotters up, yeah? Where is the geezer? I think he should be held to account for it. Twat.”

I tell him I’ve got an important question, and produce a hand-drawn diagram of my “twatometer” to see where he rates today’s politicians alongside Cameron. “Twatometer? Well, Cameron’s a twat because when the vote didn’t go his way he fucked off. So that’s what makes him a twat more than anybody.” Where would he place Starmer on the twatometer? “Errr …” He stops, and suddenly I see a new Dyer in front of me – Danny the diplomat. “I don’t know whether I want to get into this clickbait, I’ll be straight with you. It’s going to feed into this shit I don’t really want to get into, you know what I mean?”

But Danny the diplomat doesn’t have much staying power. “This is my main issue. Successive governments have fucked us. And what they do is make sure we’re all pointing fingers at each other, whether that’s down to race or immigration. So we end up fighting each other, and not coming together and pointing the finger at the right people. That’s the fucking point.” He’s on a roll. “Look at Labour. They’re meant to be for working-class people and they’ve gone straight for minorities and pensioners and disability benefits. All these things Labour were supposed to stand up for. And you go, hold on a minute, I thought the Tories were the cunts. What the Tories did during Covid was fucking abhorrent. It’s the only reason Starmer got in. It was all there for him on a plate. And now he’s managed to get both the left and the right to fucking hate his guts. I just want someone to speak and you believe them, and we haven’t had that in so long I’ve forgotten what it’s like.” Finally, he comes to a stop.

The first question on The Assembly was asked by a nervous young woman called Chardonnay. “Should we have a little cuddle?” Dyer asked. And they did, then she delivered a zinger. “When Jo kicked you out, she emptied your shared bank account. Do you still have a shared bank account now? And you have to answer honestly.” Dyer smiled and put a hand over his eyes in mock horror. He then said: “She did kick me out, cos I was a prick, and she deserved better, and I was an idiot, and sometimes I would go out, and I’d get off my head, take drugs and I wouldn’t come home for three days. And she had every right to throw me out. She controls everything now.”

At the time, Dyer became such a mess that he stopped getting work. He couldn’t be trusted; he was broke and the bailiffs visited the family home. Then came his rehabilitation with EastEnders. And then he lost it again. This time he reached his lowest ebb. Dyer says he found the level of fame difficult to cope with; people change in the way they treat you, tempting you with all sorts of stuff that’s bad for you. If you’re weak, he says, you succumb. And boy, did he succumb. There were tales of threesomes, an affair with a well-known pop star, dick pics, sex texts, you name it. And, of course, there were drugs. “You get to a level of fame where you forget who you are. And I was taking a lot of drugs with different people because I was famous for taking drugs, so I was just feeding my addiction.”

What was he taking? “Mostly cocaine and diazepam.” He says diazepam was the biggest problem. “I used to eat seven 10 milligram pills at a time. Just ate them like fucking Smarties. I’d done most drugs up till that point.” Dyer takes a tiny sip of his lager. He’s still on his first pint. “It’s a good job I didn’t hang out with a lot of crackheads or I think I would have been more of a crackhead. If you’re surrounded by crackheads, you stand no hope.” I ask if he’s ever mainlined drugs. “No. Nah. Never. Could never bring myself to do that.”

In 2016, he and Jo finally married, but he was in a terrible way. A few months later, they split up again. “I got to a point when I said, ‘I’m going to die, I’m destroying everybody around me.’” At the age of 39, he went into rehab in South Africa. He thinks it saved his life, and it certainly saved his marriage. Did he think he’d screwed everything up? “Yeah, course. Absolutely. That’s why you go into these places. You don’t go into a psychiatric fucking unit if everything’s running sweet. Some people get committed, some people have to have an intervention, whereas I took myself there. I knew.”

The biggest challenge was coming off diazepam. “It’s worse than heroin. They had to wean me off. It stops anxiety, but we need anxiety and fear and sadness. When you pop a diazepam, it’s like a blanket and it covers up these receptors so you don’t feel much. And when they take you off them in rehab, the receptors come so alive.” He says it was horrific. Dyer was taught mindfulness to compensate for the drugs. “We had to go outside and pick up a leaf, and study all the veins in it. I thought, what the fuck are we doing here? It was actually training your brain to calm that fear. You’re concentrating in the moment rather than thinking of all the shit that has happened in the past or could happen. It’s about being able to sit with your own thoughts and feelings, and that’s something I’m very comfortable with now. I think they should teach kids this at school.” There’s a lovely moment on The Assembly when he shows everyone how to meditate. “If you talk about meditation to most people, they laugh. They go, ‘I haven’t got time. What, you’re sitting here going, Mmmmmm?’ But it’s all about breathing. Oxygen is a fucking healer. It’s important. Now and again when I have these moments of anxiety, I just breathe.”

He says it was in rehab in Cape Town that he learned what it was like to be a regular person again. “I had to get out of the country. The fame and the ego were raging, so I needed to go somewhere where no one knew the fuck who I was. You’re broken down again. You’re a number in there. No one gives a shit about your job or your ego. You’re scrubbing toilets, you work in the kitchen. It’s a bit like prison.” In the psychiatric unit, he says, he was put back together again. “That doesn’t mean you skip out of the place going, ‘I’m cured,’ and everyone’s happy with you. Then you have to address the people you’ve hurt and the pain you’ve caused. This is still something me and my missus work through.”

I head off for a wee. Dyer is still nursing the same pint. By the time I get back, he’s public property.

“You out on the piss today, you two?” he asks a couple of middle-aged women taking selfies with him.

Then their fellas walk through to join them. “They were hiding,” one of the women says. “Would you mind a photo with all of us?”

“Don’t worry! It makes me look good with the Guardian. I paid you to come up to me!”

He does a short video message for the pub manager’s brother because it’s his birthday, and then he’s back with me. “I’ve lost my train of thought. Right, let’s talk about Rivals.”

Why does he think it’s so popular? “The 80s is such a great decade – big shoulder pads, big hair, glitter everywhere, a lot of smoking, great decade for film, brilliant music. And we’ve really captured it.”

Halfway through shooting the second series, Jilly Cooper died. What impact did that have? “It was a complete shock to everybody. We were told in the morning, and we were all a bit freaked. There were some tears, and then we continued. It’s what Jilly would have wanted. The producers said: ‘We’ll raise a glass to her at the end of the day, because she loved her champagne,’ so we did. At the funeral, she didn’t want no one to wear dark colours.” What did he wear? “I went for a tuxedo with a low T-shirt and a pink scarf. She would have loved a flash of pink.” And a flash of chest hair? “Yeah, she loved a bit of chest. We really did celebrate her that day. It was very emotional.” Do people see him differently since Rivals? “I think so. Certainly critically. People are going, ‘Oh, maybe he’s not just a caricature and he can act a little bit.’” You play gentle people beautifully, I say. “Well, I am quite a gentle person in real life.” Is he closer to Freddie or the wired-up coke heads he has played? “Freddie. All day long. Anybody who knows me absolutely knows I’m Freddie.” The thing he loves about Freddie, and Mick Carter in EastEnders, is they’re not afraid to show their emotions. “I like masculinity in men and taking the piss out of each other, but it’s also important to be able slip into that feminine side and open up about your feelings. We’re brought up as young boys to be boys, but not men.” In other words, many men never grow up. “You have to find out how to be a decent man. We’re so frightened of being too cuddly or affectionate or crying.”

Does he cry much? “Yes. I’m a sensitive soul.”

* * *

A few weeks later, we catch up on the phone. Initially, I get Diplomatic Danny. “Don’t do any of that clickbait stuff, Simon, I trust you.” But you can only keep Laddish Danny down for so long. A couple of days ago, he was captured on TV at West Ham in the quarter-final of the FA Cup dancing, with a grandchild in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, singing along with the crowd: “Bowen’s on fire; and he’s shagging Dani Dyer.” Not surprisingly, it went viral. “Yeah,” he says sheepishly. “It wasn’t ideal for me, that, you know what I mean? I had all my grandkids with me. I’ll be aware of it next time.”

I’ve been thinking about what Dyer said about having to learn how to be a man. Does he think, in this era of toxic masculinity, he could be a positive role model? No, he says, that’s where we get him wrong. Because he’s played football thugs, there are rightwing hooligans who claim him as their own, and similarly because he called out Cameron for having his trotters up, there are those on the left who think he’s championing their cause. The truth is, he says, he’s just struggling through life like all of us, learning from mistakes, trying to do the best he can for his family. “All I can focus on is the people around me and my son. That’s real life to me. I’m not on some fucking mission to change society. I’ll speak out about stuff now and again, but I’m not on a crusade. I’m just looking after the young men around me and hopefully I’ll lead by example.”

When we met in the pub, I told him my older daughter was a fan of his, but she was disappointed that he did gambling commercials. Again, he says, you’ve got the wrong man if you’re looking for a paragon of virtue. He’s known what it’s like to be broke, and he knows it could happen again at any time. So when there’s an opportunity to cash in, he’s going to do it. “I understand there’s morality around it, but let me tell you now, there’s other shit to worry about than a fucking gambling advert.”

Since we met, the world has become an even more dangerous place. “Look what’s going on with Trump and his threat of nuclear war. All of our politicians, all of them, have fucked us over and over again. And we just seem lost,” he says.

So the idea that he, Danny Dyer, can make a difference to society, or encourage a move away from toxic masculinity, is ludicrous to him. “Protest makes no difference, clearly. It’s very difficult to take on the elites. So it’s all just about loving people, loving life, getting good people around you. Enjoy your fucking life, man. Enjoy it. Squeeze as much joy out of it as you possibly can. D’you know what I mean?”

• Rivals season two launches on Disney+ on 15 May, with a three‑episode premiere