The consistently impressive Danny Dyer makes another edgy role his own in a film set in the Costa del Crime. He talks to Michael Dwyer
Roundly derided as the Decade That Taste Forgot, the 1980s is celebrated in all its gaudiness in The Business, Nick Love's adrenaline-pumped picture of English gangsters up to no good in their Costa del Sol refuge. Accompanied by a soundtrack packed with hit singles from the era, the movie features the consistently impressive Danny Dyer, who has a fearless propensity for edgy roles, as a young south Londoner seduced by the rewards of crime and transformed into an operator as unscrupulous as his mentors.
"I was born in 1977, so I was a kid, climbing trees in the 1980s, and I missed the style side of things," Dyer said when we met in Dublin this week. "I remember a lot of the music, though, because my mum and dad were listening to it. Most people think of it as a decade with terrible clothes - big shoulder pads, big hair and all that New Romantics stuff - but I think we've managed to make it pretty cool."
He bubbles with fast-talking enthusiasm for the movie, his third for Love after Goodbye Charlie Bright and The Football Factory. "The Business is not as violent as The Football Factory," Dyer says. "We wanted to reach a wider audience and not just have hooligans coming to see the film. My character, Frankie, has to be the channel for the audience, and the key to that was to keep him as an outsider for most of the film, so that the audience could identify with him and see everything through his eyes.
"Nick and I have a great understanding. We don't have to talk a lot about things. He excelled himself this time, and the role was a real journey for me because Frankie changes from a boy to a man over the course of the film. I don't have a lot of dialogue because most of what I say is in the narration, which was a big challenge because you can't blag that. It's all in the eyes."
The sun-soaked movie handsomely captures its Spanish locations, but Dyer insists it was all work, all of the time. "We were staying up in the mountains over an hour away from Marbella. Nick wanted to find an area with a port that was untouched and would pass for Puerto Banus in the 1980s. He found the perfect place and we all stayed in this little village where nobody spoke English. We just got our heads together and concentrated on the job. I was so excited by this film and so wanted to do it justice."
Dyer spends most of the movie in tennis shorts as his tan gets deeper, but this didn't involve idyllic weeks lying by a pool. "The problem for me was that the film is set over six years and at the beginning I'm pale white and then get browner as it goes on," he says. "But the film was shot out of sequence, of course, so some days I had to be white in the morning for one scene and then brown in the afternoon for another. I couldn't sit out in the sun at all, but I had these two birds rubbing fake tan on me all the time. It beats making a film in Lewisham any day."
NOW 28, DYER has been acting for half his life. "I believe in fate," he says. "I was crap at school, but I had this teacher who kept telling me I should think about acting. When I was 14 with long, greasy hair, I was a bit of a thief, but my teacher was relentless and I gave in one day. She told me about this little Sunday school in Kentish Town where they did drama workshops for two hours every week and it cost nothing.
"She said agents came there now and again, and the first Sunday I ever went there, this agent came up to me afterwards and said she wanted me on her books. That's what I mean about fate. She got me an audition for Prime Suspect 3 the next day and I got the part. I was 14 and my very first scene ever in this game was with David Thewlis.
"I played a rent boy and he was my pimp, and in my first scene he chases me down an alleyway and kisses me on the mouth. So I was thrown in at the deep end. I had one scene with Helen Mirren and afterwards she told me I was really talented. I don't know if she says that to everyone. And I got £1,500 for a week's work. I'd never seen that much money before in my life. My family has always been skint, so I thought this was the game for me."
And so Dyer quit school to work professionally as an actor - but this was "a really strange period. I was a child actor with a baby face, but when my voice broke, I still couldn't shave, so I was in a really difficult position because I couldn't play a child and I couldn't play an adult. So I had to go back to loading skips and shit like that, but it made me determined to get every audition I went for.
"There's a lot of rejection, of course, but that's all part of the learning process for every actor. You just have to pick yourself up and carry on."
Dyer had to wait five years for his next big break, when Justin Kerrigan cast him as motor-mouthed Moff, one of the five young hedonists wrapped up in the Cardiff club culture milieu of Human Traffic.
"That was really the start for me," he says, "but I still had to go back to loading skips for a while in between jobs, which was weird. Some people recognised me from Human Traffic, but I pretended I was someone else. My daughter Dani was born when I was only 19, so I had to bring the money in."
A YEAR LATER HE gave an outstanding performance in Peter Sheridan's film of Borstal Boy, as the gay sailor who befriends Brendan Behan, who was played by mannered US actor Shawn Hatosy. "I don't know why they went for an American to play Brendan Behan," Dyer says. "They should have gone for an Irish actor. I wanted just to keep it real in my role. My character was gay and quite open about it. That was the key to him. I didn't want him to be camp or any of those other cliches. It was about man love and that was it. I'm proud of that film and I loved working with Peter Sheridan. It's a shame more people didn't see it. It sometimes turns up on Sky around four o'clock in the morning."
Last year Dyer featured in the low-budget British drama, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, which caused a furore at the recent Cannes and Edinburgh festivals. "I haven't seen it yet," he says. "I was out of work at the time. I read the script and thought it was fucking weird, but I'm only in it for about 10 minutes.
"It's about these young guys bored out of their heads and smoking pot in Brighton, and I play one of their cousins who takes them to a crack den and this leads to a gang rape. You don't really see anything, it's all heard, but it was a really horrible scene to shoot. Then, I disappear out of the film and turn up again at the end for another rape scene, which is even heavier than the first one.
"I just could never get my head around the film. I thought it would never see the light of day. It was just a quick bit of money for me. It paid my phone bill. To me, it's not something you want to watch. I don't believe every film should have a moral ending, but it's got to have something going on with it."
Dyer has completed several other movies for release in the coming months - Severance, a horror movie set in Hungary; The All Together, a black comedy with Martin Freeman; and The Other Half, in which Dyer plays a Londoner bringing his American bride on honeymoon to Portugal, where his secret agenda is to catch the Euro 2004 football tournament.
SOME OF DYER'S best reviews have been for his stage work. In Peter Gill's Certain Young Men, he played the youngest and brashest of eight gay men so convincingly that a well-known pop singer came on to him heavily. "He would not leave me alone," he says. "He was adamant that I was gay."
Dyer worked under the direction of Harold Pinter in two of the writer's plays, Celebration, and in London and on Broadway in No Man's Land. "I learned a lot from Pinter," he says. "He took a real shine to me - partly, I think, because I didn't even know who he was when I auditioned for Celebration. At the audition all the other guys were reading their lines and looking sweatyand terrified.
"I just walked in and said, 'Hello, son. How're you doing?', and he asked if there was anything I'd like to ask him. I said, 'No, will we just crack on?'. I could see in his face that he doesn't get that often because people are usually fannying around him. It was only after working for him that I realised what a genius he is.
"When we were rehearsing No Man's Land, I got a message from him the week before we opened, saying straight up that he had cancer and intended to fight it, and he wished me luck for the opening night. We didn't see him again for a month or so until he came in one night and that was the biggest night of my life, to be doing the play while he was watching."
The Business is on general release