Danny Cipriani

Interview by Amber Rawlings

“I think you’ll write this up and be like, this is a fucking therapy session, man.” To be fair, Danny Cipriani would be right. After just an hour with the guy, he’s managed to convert a cynic to an idealist. Of course, the retired rugby player doesn’t pick up on my penchant for pessimism. He tells me, on numerous occasions, that I’m quite the opposite. “You’re a wonderful human,” he says — twice. But what Cipriani doesn’t realise is that me being, as he puts it, “so present” is a reflection of him. He’s incredibly open and candid. The painful recesses of his life, the kind of tidbits I’d seen him divulge on The High Performance Podcast, are by no means reserved for high-profile journalists. “I did not know this conversation was going to go like this,” he says with a laugh as our conversation comes to a close. Neither did I, but I’m not mad about it.

Preparing for my interview with the 37-year-old is difficult. I’m under the impression that it’s, if you will, “damage control” — our meeting in Battersea Park, on a surprisingly sunny day in February, comes just over a week after the Daily Mail published a tell-all from Cipriani’s ex-wife. In that, she cites what the rag has dubbed a “psychotic, mushroom-fuelled episode” as contributing to their marriage’s demise. We do touch on the subject, by the way — Cipriani tells me that their relationship was built on a lot of “mistruths”. Apart from the recent press attention, though? Nada. The only thing I’m instructed to do before we meet is watch Celebrity Bear Hunt.

Netflix’s latest reality show venture sees Cipriani and a random slew of other celebs do a load of survival-esque challenges. If they lose? They’re summoned to the “bear pit”, where they’re hunted by, you guessed it, Bear Grylls. He’ll launch himself onto them via a zipline, emerge from a pile of leaves, or simply tackle them to the ground. It’s a bit silly. It’s a bit like a pre-watershed version of The Hunger Games. I watch all eight episodes while under the impression that Cipriani is going to have some kind of meltdown. Something in the vein of Gemma Collins’ rant about her frizzy hair on Celebrity Big Brother — the kind of thing that’s par for the course when you shove a load of stars together and film them.

Alas, nothing of the sort. He comes across very well, but I don’t glean anything intrinsic about the man. In fact, the most interesting thing I learned about Cipriani’s time on the show is that he didn’t actually get eliminated, but instead elected to leave. He tells me this, to my surprise, during our interview. “There were lots of stresses [...] that people didn't necessarily see,” he tells me. “I asked to leave once, and then I spoke to my girlfriend at the time, and she was like, no, stick it out. I did it for two more days, and then I was like, no I'm done now, I wanna go.” Cipriani insists that he was “just being [himself] the whole time,” and it was the people at the top that were the problem. “There’s this thing of wanting to make the show like this. People’s emotions and feelings are getting overlooked.” By choosing to leave the show Cipriani was, as he puts it, “honouring [himself]”, something that’s high on the priority list these days.

As I get further into my lengthy chat with Cipriani – when I stop recording, we’ve been talking for over an hour – it doesn’t surprise me that Celebrity Bear Hunt was a little too much for the former fullback. I tell him that he seems like a “sensitive” guy, to which he, perhaps reluctantly, agrees. “The word sensitive — when I was younger it used to piss me off. They would say it like it's a bad thing. I just felt everything.” He’s got a vibe about him that doesn’t quite match up to the “boys’ club” world of rugby, the sport to which he owes his fame. Quick highlight reel of that, actually — Cipriani made his debut against Bristol at the age of seventeen back in 2004. He’s won sixteen England caps and had stints at Wasps, Melbourne Rebels, Sale Sharks, Gloucester and Bath. He then fully retired from the sport back in January of last year. He says it himself: “In my day, I probably was the best in the world at what I did.” But did he fit in? “People just didn't know what to do with me. I would say what I feel, so I got judged and labelled, and that obviously added a lot to my experience.”

One such label? Cipriani was dubbed the “bad boy” of the sport. Obviously, though, that wasn’t owed to his time on the pitch — that element, he tells me, he “found a breeze.” It was Cipriani’s personal life – which has been tabloid fodder ever since he stepped into the public eye – that earned him that denomination. He’s in such a toxic relationship (albeit a one-sided one) with the press that it’s somewhat hard to believe him when he insists he’s always been sensitive: “I felt my mum's pain and my dad's pain. I was aware of energy in that way.” You can’t help but wonder if being perpetually hounded by rags has forced him to take on this enlightened perspective. He calls the tabloids, like he calls many things during our interview, “the toughest training ground.” They’re also his “biggest blessing.” He even likens them to a “teenager which just never grows up. Staying moody and pissed off, throwing punches at everything and everyone it sees.”

It’s a perspective that Cipriani, perhaps, has to have. “That's the cards I've been dealt,” he says. I guess the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, something he knows all too well. It was in 2019 that Cipriani dated TV presenter Caroline Flack, who took her own life early the following year — her death has become a kind of symbol for what can occur as a consequence of the vulture-like behaviour of British tabloids. “When Caroline passed, I made a vow to ask how this is ever going to change? How is the media ever going to change how they speak about people?” Cipriani pivots the conversation to his late ex surprisingly early on in our chat, explaining that her passing was integral to how he processes his own emotions. “When Caroline passed five years ago, I had a few years of holding onto so much pain. And numbing that through different sources. When she passed — that was the gift that she gave me. Like, nah, you gotta feel everything.” Before her death, Cipriani hadn’t cried in fifteen years.

It’s hard not to see the morbid irony in Cipriani and Flack’s relationship — how it played out in the press, how those same publications then contributed to Flack’s passing, and how they regurgitated whatever Cipriani had to say on the matter when she was gone. Everything is just fodder. The same is true for Cipriani’s love life on the whole. As he puts it himself, he’s “notoriously not found love in a way which has been consistent.” The tabloids (in this case, The Mirror) would call that his “torrid love rat past.” But hearing it from the man himself obviously puts it in a very different light.

Cipriani is acutely aware that the “unconscious things [he] learnt as a child,” have a habit of rearing their ugly head when it comes to matters of love. “Whenever I'd fall in love,” he says. “I'd feel like, oh, something's gonna go wrong here.” What he calls “unconscious patterns” are a key tenet of our conversation, and it’s not falling on deaf ears. It’s hard not to relate to the story of his Dad leaving when he was ten, which he calls “the worst day of [his] life.” “He got in the lift, and I ran down all the stairs of our council block. I held on to his leg all the way to the taxi, then he flew back to Trinidad.” Cipriani isn’t resentful about what happened, though. As he says himself, only a couple of minutes into our interview, “I love my dad to bits.” He has a knack for finding the silver lining in, well, anything. Something else that comes up time and time again is the notion of “[including] it all”: that if he accepts the good and the bad, “there's nothing [he] can resist or run away from.” “If I include it all, my mind is quiet.”

Cipriani’s notorious “schmoozing”, if you will, does give our interview a certain edge. It’s hard not to read into him sending me a quote about souls meeting later on that day. But, like I said, I err on the cynical side. As we talk, I flit between taking everything in, living up to how he perceives me (“I can see that your heart's so willing”), and wondering what the hell is going on. Moreover, I’m curious as to where Cipriani’s enlightened perspective has actually come from. Therapy? Surprisingly, no. He does tell me about the one occasion he saw a therapist, back when he was twenty-two and wanted to take his life, but on the whole he regards it as having too much “structure.” “The heart doesn't want rigidity [...] What we do in therapy is look for answers to questions that are more abstract.” Psychedelics, then? Has Cipriani had some kind of ego death, just as his ex-wife implied? While he admits that there’s been times he’s reached for them, and that they can “open you up to things”, he ultimately believes that “everything is still there” without them. “I walk and I feel the divine everywhere,” he tells me.

Cipriani certainly has his vices. In the past, that took the form of drugs. “I took painkillers for a long time, smoked a lot of weed.” He’s got a penchant for a tattoo. “I actually enjoy the feeling. My tattooist is like, how you feeling? I'm like, I'm loving it.” Even rugby was about being in, as he puts it, “a lot of physical discomfort.” It’s not self-harm exactly, but there’s clearly a lot that Cipriani is still processing. And where he’s at right now, the more he can do that, the better. He attributes that realisation to someone called Patrick Connor.

I do a little digging (a quick Google search) and it turns out that Patrick Connor is a “spiritual teacher”, “guru” and “visionary.” One that was educated at Cambridge, though. I’m surprised to read that on the website for the Sharmadá Foundation, a philanthropic organization which Connor founded. I’m also surprised that Connor’s teachings have transmuted into Cipriani’s lamentations on everything from “vibrations” to “past lives”. “That's another story of the world that we're in. It's you gotta go do this and get that and be this and be that. That puts you on this treadmill all the time. Now, it feels like I'm in an armchair and everything's just unfolding. If that's the case, love's gonna find me.” At times it can be hard to keep up. It can also be quite difficult to discern what level of allegory we’re operating at.

To be honest, what fills our hour-long chat is the kind of stuff that I might roll my eyes at if it were coming out of someone else’s mouth. But Cipriani is so earnest that I’m sold. I find myself opening up. About forty-five minutes in, I’m even contemplating quitting therapy. “It can feel like a big step, but ultimately your heart knows the truth,” he responds. I tell you what, he’d be a good cult leader. Cipriani really is compelling, though. And that’s owed to the fact that these moments of clarity – real epiphanies it seems – haven’t just been born out of a good chat with some self-styled mystic. They haven’t arisen out of a particularly transcendental trip to Bali either. They’re a result of the retired rugby player going through his fair share of trauma and making the decision to embrace it, warts and all. “Everything’s got to be included. If you're trying to resist whatever it was, it's going to come back around.” It’s a notion he returns to on so many occasions that it becomes almost nonsensical — but I get it.

It might seem odd to end this profile by turning the focus back upon myself, but given how unexpectedly candid our “therapy session” of an interview was, it feels fitting. So, am I a cynic? In lots of ways, yes. That's what makes me a good person to sit across from Cipriani — I'm not likely to be swept up with chatter on the "divine." Yet here I am, converted. Almost, anyway. There's something telling in how he insists he’s now “purging” all these unconscious impulses. For someone who speaks about embracing the whole spectrum of emotions, Cipriani seems remarkably quick to transform every wound into wisdom. Perhaps his final lesson is learning when not to find the lesson. For all his enlightenment, Cipriani still struggles with what he preaches to others — going easy on himself, and letting some things just be what they are: painful.