Women have been sending Danny Dyer “mad shit” on the internet lately. “I’ve become some kind of wank material for middle-class, middle-aged women,” he says, with genuine confusion. He is standing in his aircraft hangar of a kitchen, in socks and sliders, his hair slicked back, swigging from a can of Red Bull, looking like an exhausted Essex dad (he’s been shooting Sky comedy Mr Bigstuff in the area all week). Gunshot sounds are blasting out of a nearby door; his young son is playing Call of Duty. From elsewhere, the muffled clattering of someone making pancakes on Saturday Kitchen. And here, by the fridge: the nation’s new wank fantasy, holding out his phone like it might detonate.

It started in October, when Rivals landed on Disney+. An adaption of the 1988 Jilly Cooper novel, the show is about feuding men in the world of regional television; there are Tory MPs, vast country mansions, huge hair and louche parties where everyone is having extramarital sex with everyone else. Dyer plays Freddie Jones, the richest man in it, a working-class guy who made his money in tech that no one else understands. To play him, Dyer wore a dreadful wig and grew a moustache for six months, which got him some looks down at Morrisons. “I look like fucking Bob Carolgees,” he says, referring to the ’80s TV puppeteer who became the face of Hellmann’s Mayonnaise.

When it comes to himself, Dyer is in on the joke; it’s why he wore a ruff on Danny Dyer’s Right Royal Family. But this one – he doesn’t get it. Rivals is a show where Poldark’s Aidan Turner takes his shirt off (again), where Alex Hassell strides full-frontally nude across a tennis court in the sun. So why is he the subject of the nation’s horny memes?

Read more at British GQ.