He went from Harold Pinter’s protege to barely scraping a living to roaring success in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals. With the release of his new film Marching Powder, he talks about his journey from national joke to national treasure

The Danny Dyer fanbase is an eclectic one. There are the ravers who got in on the ground floor, idolising Moff, the ranting pill dealer Dyer played in the 1999 film Human Traffic. There are the “sort of alpha males”, as he calls them; basically, lads who were into The Football Factory and his run of 00s films about hooliganism, drugs and sex (usually all three). Then, a nine-year run in EastEnders brought onside a lot of “old ladies”, he says. And now, with the success of Rivals – the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s book, in which he plays the kind-hearted self-made millionaire Freddie Jones – a hornier faction has joined his supporters’ ranks.

“I’m getting a lot of women of a certain age and a certain class come up to me in the street,” says Dyer, “you know, just sort of drooling.”