Danny Dyer recalls suffering “major panic attack” during play after “smoking crack”
British actor Danny Dyer has opened up about a harrowing stage incident which occurred in 2001 while he was appearing in the Harold Pinter play, Celebration, in New York.
At this stage in his career, Dyer was still a young talent who was yet to make a name for himself in the industry. However, Pinter acted as a mentor to him, and the chance to take Celebration from London to New York was a significant moment for Dyer, who found himself distracted by the hedonistic opportunities on offer in the Big Apple.
Before this frightening ordeal, Dyer was a comfortable stage performer who felt at home in-front of theatre crowds. During a new appearance on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, he explained, “I’d heard about people that had dried on stage because it’s a massive thing, and it never happened to me.”
However, that all changed after one night to forget after a drug-fuelled session. “Anyway, I thought that I could sit up all night smoking crack and then walk on stage, and of course you can’t do that. It’s a ridiculous idea,” Dyer recalled.
When it came to performing, the Human Traffic actor “didn’t have a clue what to say” and forgot his lines, which was made worse by the fact he felt it was a self-inflicted disaster. “And the worst thing was the other actors, who knew I’d been out, looking at me… Their faces were [turned] away from the audience, and it was just their horror,” he continued.
Once he departed the stage, Dyer’s problems worsened when he suffered a panic attack that made him afraid to resume the play. “I come off stage going, ‘I can’t go back on, I can’t’. I just had a major panic attack, but I just had to get on with it,” he remembered.
Thankfully, Pinter was on hand to reassure Dyer during this distressing chapter, the actor noted, “And then Harold came up to me after and he sort of gave me a cuddle and that made me worse, made me cry… And he went, ‘If ever there’s an ensemble piece, it’s this, Danny’.”
Following the incident, Dyer refrained from taking drugs “for the duration of the play” and admitted it was a “wake-up call”. However, once he returned home, the actor began dabbling again before eventually entering a South African rehab in 2016 after he “lost sense of who I was.”
Meanwhile, Dyer recently made an unexpected appearance at BST Hyde Park on July 6th to perform the Blur classic ‘Parklife’ with Robbie Williams. His latest acting project is the new comedy series, Mr Bigstuff, which is set to premiere on Sky Max on July 17th.
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