I was a club singer in Rotherham ... now I’m starring in Emmerdale and Robert De Niro is talking to me
if I don’t work for the next few years as an actor, I can still pay myself a wage,” he says.
“I’ve got mates who have earned a fortune but they have literally got nothing because they went out and bought a Lamborghini.
“It would be so embarrassing to me not to be able to do things for my kids.”
His appreciation of money is understandable after earning as little as £42 a night on the club singing circuit.
Raised in a pub, he worked in a car dealership by day and as a singer by night, following in his dad’s footsteps.
“I really enjoyed listening to my dad sing and my mum was a really good singer,” he says.
“We had a pub and a pub pianist and when I was about 13 or 14 I would get up and sing something and people were always really kind.
“Obviously I was rubbish but people would tell me I was brilliant. My first wage in a club was £42. At the time I was getting £40 a week for 39 hours in the parts department of a car dealership. I always knew I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to be on the stage.”
Performing in clubs across the north of England was Dean’s life until he bagged a role in Ken Loach’s 2001 film The Navigators. A comedian had told Dean about Loach auditioning non-actors for a new film, so he went along to try his luck.
“I had never heard of Ken Loach,” he says. “But you go into this meeting and he talks to you about yourself and I ended up with a nice role in this film.
“Then an agent got in touch and put me up for some stuff and I went along, learned the lines, did some auditions and I got something quite quickly.
“And it just went from there and I learned on the job. I never told anyone I wasn’t an actor as I thought they would just tell me to bugger off.”
From there Dean landed parts in Kay Mellor’s Between the Sheets alongside Blethyn and then the role that really made him famous, as DS Ray Carling in Life on Mars with Philip Glenister and John Simm.
But even when he had made it, Dean kept up his club singing, fearing that the acting work might dry up.
“It took me 10 years to say I was an actor, he says. “I used to say I’m a singer, but I do a bit of acting as well.
“Even when I was filming Life on Mars, I still sang in the clubs at the weekend. People would say to me, ‘What are you doing here? You must be a millionaire now’. But by the time we started Ashes to Ashes seven years later, I finally gave up singing.”
Now he is playing ex-drug baron Will Taylor, with whom Harriet [Katherine Dow-Blyton] faked a relationship for five years as an undercover policewoman to gather enough evidence to get him sent to prison where she believed he had died.
Instead, he is alive and kicking and hell bent on revenge on Harriet.
And now that Dean’s made his mark in the Yorkshire soap, he is hoping he gets to stay a while.
“I am closer to 60 than I am to 50,” he says. “But when you see somebody like Chris Chittell who has been there for like 30 years, you think wow. I’d love to stay as long as they’ll have me.”
But that practical side is still there underneath it all.
“You’ve got to have something else in case it doesn’t work out,” he says. “I trained to be a chef at catering college when I was 35. I didn’t want to still be doing the Ricky Martin stuff on stage in leather trousers when I was 60.”