Danny Dyer says he was “off the rails for many years” after Harold Pinter’s death
Actor Danny Dyer has revealed that after the death of his mentor and Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, he suffered a “spiral of madness”.
Speaking as part of the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, he revealed that he learnt of Pinter’s death from a newspaper. He recounted: “I’d been on a bender and I was coming home and I was going, I think I was going to buy cigarettes at the petrol garage, and I see it in the paper: ‘Pinter dead’.”
He recounted how the guilt “sent him on a spiral of madness”. He had previously stayed at Pinter’s home in 2000 while performing in his play Celebration. One one performance, Dyer forgot his lines and had a panic attack, but Pinter was there to help him. “He put his arm around me,” he said, “and made me feel better about it.”
He had recounted this story before, revealing how the performance came the day 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.
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’.”
At an even on May 9th, Dyer also opened up about his abuse of prescription drugs whilst he performed in EastEnders. The actor, who has suffered from drink and drug abuse in the past and went to rehab in 2017, said he would down pints on set, before bosses stepped in. “I was off my nut for a lot of that job, I’ve got to say. I was on a lot of valium and diazepam,” he recalled.
Dyer is reportedly developing an idea for a play about his relationship with Pinter.
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