How a brilliant, poignant Danny Dyer performance gave Rivals its greatest plot twist

There are more pleasures in the new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals than can be listed here – the laugh-out-loud moments of physical comedy, the superbly evoked Eighties setting and the genuinely intriguing plot machinations, to name but three – but one of the chief appeals lies in its excellent casting. David Tennant is, of course, a known quantity as the dastardly Lord Tony Baddingham, Alex Hassell is the epitome of the legendary womaniser Rupert Campbell-Black and a cast full of superb stage and screen actors, from Katherine Parkinson to Aidan Turner, have made the series appointment viewing for late 2024. 

Yet the stand-out performance is given by a surprising figure. As the awkwardly out-of-place entrepreneur Freddie Jones, a moustachioed Danny Dyer is not just brilliant in the role, but manages to convey depth and nuance far beyond the character’s depiction in the script – or, for that matter, in the original novel. As he slowly inches towards an understanding, and then more, with Parkinson’s lonely romantic novelist Lizzie Vereker, Dyer mines every single ounce of pathos and humour from the character, whether he’s surreptitiously taking forbidden spuds from a buffet (“one potato, two potato, three potato, four”) or bashfully telling Lizzie, when she complains about having a ladder in her tights, “I love a ladder – stairway to heaven and all that.” 

Forget all the bed-hopping and Eighties tunes. Whenever Dyer is on screen, Rivals goes from being cartoonishly addictive television to something more essential: the mark of a great actor’s ability to transform promising source material into rich and poignant drama. 

Still, when lauding Dyer’s ability to steal scenes from his RSC-trained co-stars, it must be remembered that, for many years, he was treated as one of the worst actors in Britain. For a lengthy period, he was typecast as a working-class hard man, dispensing headbutts and strained one-liners with the same kind of Essex lad aggression. If you haven’t seen the likes of Dead Man Running, Freerunner or Pimp, then rest assured, you are not missing much. 

Dyer was a prolific screen presence for much of the Noughties, and beyond – he made 13 films in 2009 and 2010 alone – but even Dyer’s closest associates might hesitate to describe most of these pictures as possessing the tiniest artistic value, or, indeed that he was stretching himself. Dyer himself was all too aware of this. “I’ve made over 40 films,” he said in 2011. “I’d say a quarter of them are s___, another quarter are all right and I’d say half of them have got something to say.” Most would agree with the first part, some with the second, and the third was a rather questionable assertion.   

He also seemed to be stuck with one mode of performance. When he tried to lighten his repertoire with an appearance as a philandering cab driver in the screen adaptation of Ray Cooney’s Run For Your Wife in 2012, it was a spectacular failure. Not only did the film make a pitiful £602 on its opening weekend, but outraged critics queued up to eviscerate both the picture (“as funny as leprosy” and “containing not one single, solitary laugh” were two typical comments) and Dyer’s performance, which was compared, unfavourably, with that of Robin Askwith in the Confessions… series, suggesting that his natural condition was not that of a light farceur. 

Instead, for many years, Dyer combined an obnoxiously swaggering on-screen presence with an off-screen persona that was somewhere between belligerent and imbecilic. He became notorious in 2010 when, in a brief and unlikely stint as an agony uncle for the defunct men’s magazine Zoo, he offered a reader some especially grim advice as to how to get over a broken heart. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, son. I’d suggest going out on a rampage with the boys, getting on the booze and smashing anything that moves. Then, when some bird falls for you, you can turn the tables and break her heart. Of course, the other option is to cut your ex’s face, and then no one will want her.” 

There was a swift, outraged backlash, and although Dyer swiftly put out a statement. “This is totally out of order, I am totally devastated,” it read. “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.” But the damage was done. 

Dyer might have been written off at this point, and he was his own worst enemy much of the time. The film critic Mark Kermode used to do unflattering impersonations of him on his radio show, which led Dyer to respond. “Our paths will meet, one day, and there won’t be no talking,” he said, darkly. “It’ll probably just be a headbutt straight to the f______ nose, and then he can go off and do his impressions with a broken nose. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?” 

Yet when he was cast as Mick Carter, the new landlord of the Queen Vic pub, in EastEnders, Dyer was able to reach an entirely new set of viewers, who would have cared little for films like Pimp, but were now able to enjoy Dyer’s gruff, oddly wounded charisma, a role that he played for seven years and which transformed his career. Not only did he win two consecutive awards at the National Television Awards for Best Serial Drama Performance, but it transformed him into a national treasure: a reputation cemented when he appeared on Who Do You Think You Are in 2016, and discovered that he was descended from Edward III. Affectionate jokes about Dyer always having been a bit of ruff duly followed. 

Dyer’s excellence in Rivals may have come as a surprise to those who have only followed his less demanding work. But for seasoned Dyer-watchers, it is about time that this grievously underrated actor was seen as an actor, rather than merely a performer. He began his career with roles as a villainous lance-corporal in William Boyd’s directorial debut, the First World War drama The Trench, and an out-of-control drug user in the cult narcotics comedy Human Traffic. Had the former had the success of the latter, he would have been regarded as a talented, versatile presence on screen. 

“Danny was sensational in The Trench,” Boyd tells me. “His performance, playing the bad guy, is visceral, intense -- brilliantly naturalistic acting – more than holding his own opposite the likes of Daniel Craig, Cillian Murphy and Ben Whishaw, to name but three of the then “unknowns” in the cast. He was only 22 when we made the Trench but it was very clear the lad was going to go far.” 

Yet he then started working with the director Nick Love, with whom he made four films in relatively swift succession. Love was, perhaps unfairly, ridiculed as a sub-Guy Ritchie figure, making derivative and low-grade crime films, and Dyer, as his regular lead actor, got a similar amount of stick. Even here, though, Dyer could shine; in 2007’s underrated Outlaw, in which he held his own against Sean Bean and Bob Hoskins, Dyer played effectively against type as a beta-male office worker drawn into violence against his instincts or wishes. 

However, Dyer was always capable of vastly more interesting work. When Kermode was baiting him in 2015, Dyer responded “Grow some b______ and tag me in to your childish comment. Did you ever see Wasp?” He was referring to Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning 2003 short film, in which he played the role of a potential love interest, and did so with remarkable delicacy and nuance: he was right to be proud of his performance. And even while he was becoming the go-to actor for druggish laddishness, he was capable of subverting the stereotypes in chilling fashion, as with his performance in Thomas Clay’s deeply disturbing and ultraviolent The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, in which he plays a grim and exploitative figure who is devoid of the cheeky grin and likeable patter that Dyer’s characters usually featured. 

And Dyer had an unlikely mentor, too. As Boyd says: “Harold Pinter (whom I knew) came to a screening of The Trench and was so taken with Danny that he started casting him in productions of his plays. So there is a Pinter/Dyer connection that also establishes his chops as an actor.” He first appeared on stage in Pinter’s Celebration in 2000, and would act in several more Pinter plays, including undeniably demanding parts in No Man’s Land and The Homecoming. The two men became close friends – as Dyer himself said in a documentary about their relationship in 2020, “This might seem an unlikely pairing: the likely lad and the Nobel Prize winner”. 

But as soon as Dyer greeted Pinter at an audition with “How you doin’, son?” the playwright was won over by the younger man’s authenticity and irreverence. “He was the only person who I feared but loved,” Dyer has said of Pinter. “He had faith in me, he suffered all my s___ because he knew I was a talented actor. He was a f______ tyrant, too, you know, but he could get away with it because he was so enchanting.” Even when Dyer turned up on stage in the Broadway production of The Homecoming worse for wear and forgot his lines – “I was off my nut” – Pinter still forgave him. 

Bad boy actor, Pinter muse, soap superstar and now Middle England’s pin-up of choice: does that most hoary of accolades, national treasuredom, beckon for Danny Dyer? Well hold your horses, as the man himself might say. He’s not booked into the National Theatre or the RSC just yet, and his next major film project is a reunion with Love, Marching Powder, which at first glance looks like the same old shouting, swearing and snorting. 

Yet even this one might be more intriguing than it first sounds. The now-47 year old Dyer is playing a character who has to grow up and take responsibility for his life, or find himself going to prison. While the film’s outcome may not be in doubt, the producers’ description of it as a “romantic comedy about addiction, violence and happy endings” suggests that it might have appeal beyond the usual Love-Dyer axis. 

In Rivals, he’s defied expectations and won many new fans. Now, with this immense amount of goodwill behind him, Dyer has a choice: pursue the interesting, unusual parts that he’s sporadically taken on throughout his career, and reinvent himself as an actor of real ability and nuance, or go back into his old ways of shouting about slags and bugle. Hopefully the path before him is a clear one, but we shall see.