If you take on the Empire Pint Of Milk interview, you’ll get asked a series of very specific questions. Including – yes – ‘How much is a pint of milk?’, and ‘When were you last naked outdoors?’, and ‘What song would you like to have played at your funeral?’ The answers always uncovers hitherto unknown facts about whoever’s in the hot seat. Take, for instance, Danny Dyer – legendary geezer, Human Traffic icon, and now star of Disney+ hit Rivals. When he got Pint Of Milk’d in the Mickey 17 issue of Empire – on sale Thursday 24 October – he opened up about a hobby that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from the screen godfather of pubs and pills.
“I like to build stuff. I’m building something at the moment. It’s a library,” Dyer tells Empire, showing off a little wooden model. “This one’s quite tricky, because I’ve gotta wire it all up with the electrics, so the lamps work.” If his model-making hobby has seen him graduate onto the hard stuff, Dyer’s gateway was a toy brick habit picked up while COVID reigned. “I went through a mad stage with LEGO during lockdown,” he explains. “I built Hogwarts, which was amazing. So LEGO really got me into it and I thought, ‘Actually, I want to build other things.’ I’ve got these magnifying glasses, I look ridiculous, I look like Doc out of Back To The Future. But it keeps me indoors.”
Once the library is finished, Dyer already has his next building project in line. “It’s a train carriage from the 1940s,” he says. “And then behind the train carriage there’s a moving window so it looks like the train’s moving. It looks quite tricky, but I’ll start that once I’ve banged out me library. I just love it, I can squirrel away all day at it. I suppose it doesn’t really suit my persona. But I think a man pushing 50 needs a hobby.” So, if you see Danny Dyer in the LEGO shop – or the Airfix aisle of your local Hobbycraft – don’t worry: you’re not hallucinating.
Read the full Danny Dyer Pint Of Milk interview in the Mickey 17 issue of Empire, on sale Thursday 24 October. Order a copy online here. Rivals is streaming now on Disney+.