The quintessentially American superhero Danny Dyer auditioned for: “Why don’t they want me?”
Many of cinema’s biggest stars from the ‘Golden Age’ to the modern day have built successful careers on the back of doing nothing but playing various extensions of themselves, but it’s a wild understatement to say that doing the same thing in perpetuity worked better for Cary Grant than it did for Danny Dyer.
Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel, Ryan Reynolds, John Wayne, and Arnold Schwarzenegger are some of the other highly-paid names who aren’t synonymous with stretching themselves onscreen, and as much as Jason Statham has proven that it can work when a geezer does it, Dyer hasn’t had the same luck.
He’s been a working actor for over 30 years, but he’s never been in an American movie. He’s tried, repeatedly from the sound of it, but at no point has Hollywood ever cast an envious glance in the direction of mid-range British cinema and rued the day it never gave him a shot across the pond.
Whenever you see Danny Dyer in a film or TV series, you know exactly what you’re going to get: Danny Dyer, never any more and certainly nothing less. He’s become such an archetype unto himself that it’s hard to remember and difficult to believe that he was once Harold Pinter’s protégé, although one missed opportunity could have seen him end up with Tom Hardy’s career instead of his own.
British audiences have become so accustomed to seeing him on their screens being himself that the prospect of him trying an American accent would be baffling. And yet, in his early days, Dyer didn’t only audition for three high-profile roles in major Stateside flicks; one of them was even an iconic superhero.
Reflecting on the late 1990s, before he secured his breakthrough role in Human Traffic after a number of small-screen guest spots, the London lad revealed three completely and utterly mind-boggling what-ifs. “Well, I auditioned for American History X,” he revealed. “I got quite close to that.”
Dyer could have been the Danny Vinyard to Edward Norton’s Derek until Edward Furlong beat him to the punch, but that wasn’t the only Norton-connected example. “I auditioned for Primal Fear as well,” he added, which is even more incredulous when you remember that Leonardo DiCaprio turned down the Oscar-nominated leading role, which Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal also auditioned for.
Somehow, the most bizarre was yet to come, and it’s a mental image that’s well worth conjuring after Dyer dropped the bombshell that he “auditioned for Robin in Batman & Robin with Joel Schumacher.” Just when you thought there was no way the movie could have turned out any worse, imagine Danny fucking Dyer as the ‘Boy Wonder’ to George Clooney’s ‘Caped Crusader’.
Reflecting on those missed opportunities left him with one burning question: “Why?” he asked. “Why don’t they want me?” Anyone who’s seen him acting at any point in the last three decades knows the answer to that one, but Jesus Christ, the thought of him sporting rubber nipples and cavorting with Uma Thurman in one of the worst blockbusters of the 1990s is nothing short of harrowing.
