“It’ll be the making of him”: Did Tom Hardy steal Danny Dyer’s career?
Looking at this headline, the only appropriate response seems to be an incredulous, “Catch yourself on, mate”. After all, there is a chasm between the careers of Tom Hardy, the Oscar-nominated, world-famous star of movies like Inception, Mad Max: Fury Road, and The Revenant, and Danny Dyer, whose Cockney geezer status led him to the heady heights of a recurring role on Eastenders. However, the idea that there is a sliding-door parallel universe somewhere where Dyer and Hardy swapped careers isn’t as preposterous as it seems. Well, according to Dyer, that is.
This harrowing tale of what could have been dates back to 2009, when Dyer found himself in the frame for a role in a Sky Original crime drama based on a book by Martina Cole, the famed writer of many a London gangster novel. The lead part of sociopathic criminal Freddie Jackson in The Take came Dyer’s way via his agent, and he was interested, but his representation started to discourage him from going for it.
During an episode of his podcast Sorted with the Dyers in 2020, the Football Factory star revealed that his people warned him, “No, don’t do it, because if you do this, you’re going to be pigeonholed as a gangster for the rest of your life.” Dyer took their advice and turned the role down, but with the benefit of hindsight, he realised that if he could speak to his younger self, he’d implore him, “Right, you’re going to be offered a job called The Take. Say yes to it.”
Naturally, given that Dyer’s younger self was a wideboy who never took any guff from anyone, he imagined he would have replied, “Fuck off, you got any fags, mate?” Still, he would have persisted, “No, listen. Do say yes to The Take. Because if you don’t, they will give it to an actor called Tom Hardy, and it’ll be the making of him, and he will go off and go to Hollywood. And you won’t.”
Now, let’s say Dyer had accepted The Take. Does that necessarily mean he would have been immediately whisked off to Tinseltown like Hardy, who was starring in Inception, Warrior, The Dark Knight Rises, and Lawless within a few short years? Of course not. However, it may have put him in a better position than the parade of misbegotten sub-Guy Ritchie Brit flicks he made in that period, including the eminently forgettable City Rats, Jack Said, Dead Man Running, and Pimp.
Unfortunately for Dyer, though, he was never able to make the jump to Hollywood. He eventually settled into a long-term role on Eastenders from 2013 to 2022, but in recent years, he seems to have been making an effort to put himself on American film’s radar again. Will the likes of Marching Powder and the Disney+ series Rivals finally see him grab the keys to the kingdom? Only time will tell.
For his part, Hardy has never spoken about potentially pilfering an entire career from the star of The Business. However, he did once bizarrely pitch a cage fight between Dyer and Ricky Gervais. In 2011, he told The Guardian, “I would pay good money to see those guys carve each other up. If they didn’t, I’d be trying to instigate it: ‘Go on, fellas, let’s turn the lights off, feel our way around this ring.'”
When asked why he envisioned Dyer and Gervais specifically, he answered, “I don’t want to say fuck ’em, but fuck ’em. I don’t care.” Was he joking? Does he harbour a deep resentment for Dyer that managed to squeak into the public domain in that one solitary interview? No one knows.
