BAFTA Rising Star Awards: 5 Reasons Why Danny Dyer Gets Our Vote

2. City Rats/Jack Said/7 Lives

It takes real guts, and incredible skill to create so many characters without ever letting your commitment to your own brand drop. In recent years, the likes of Bruce Willis, Al Pacino and Matthew McConnaughey have created film characters that seem suspiciously similar to themselves, and audiences have responded by ploughing millions into the box office for them - sometimes enough to outweigh the wages each star commands, and allowing the films to break even. Danny Dyer can justifiably be added to the same talent pool: in the three films named above, and indeed in many more, he has committed characters to the screen that are almost identical, despite the differences in the films, and who also look almost exactly the same as projects in which Dyer plays himself. Some might suggest that such limits imply a lack of range, or of commitment, or that Dyer simply doesn't really care about the quality of what he's making, but given that Willis, Pacino and McConnaughey remain some of the most employable actors in Hollywood, and have a raft of awards under their belts, what his approach actually displays is genius. In Dyer's most prolific acting period, he was cast in any number of British genre films (in fact, he was cast in just about all of them) and he remained unfaltering in his admirable commitment to his own brand. We don't need to know the names of those characters, or even their backgrounds, because they are all Danny Dyer - in everything they do, they effuse Dyer-ishness, and it's impossible not to see the films as excuses to see his charisma playing out in varied situations, as he plays variants on the "grumpy lower class geezer, sometimes with a gun" character model that he completely owns.