The actor Danny Dyer has discovered he is related to two English kings, but said he feels a closer affinity to another blood connection unearthed by researchers, Henry VIII’s adviser and fixer Thomas Cromwell.

Dyer is to appear in an episode of BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? next week in which his ancestry is traced back to both William the Conqueror and Edward III.

“It’s crazy. But the fact of the matter is that I am a direct descendant of royalty,” the EastEnders actor told the Radio Times.

Dyer is not the first person appearing on the programme to find he is related to William I. Researchers on previous instalments of the show found that rower Matthew Pinsent, comedian Alexander Armstrong and the BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner can all trace their routes back to William I, who had nine children.

However, Dyer is the first to find a bloodline stretching back to Cromwell and the native of London’s Canning Town said he has more in common with the cunning Tudor statesman than his blue-blooded ancestors.

“He came from a slum, I come from a slum. Cromwell left the country at 14, I started acting at 14. He was a self-taught lawyer. I’m a self-taught actor,” said Dyer.

“Cromwell had two daughters and a son. I’ve got two daughters and a son. Cromwell wrote his last letter to Henry VIII begging for his life, on 24 July, which is my birthday … And I drink in the Anne Boleyn pub.”

Cromwell was recently brought to the small screen in BBC2 drama Wolf Hall, played to critical acclaim by Mark Rylance. Dyer said Rylance was a mentor to him at 17 when they both appeared in 1996 BBC2 comedy Loving.

“I felt invincible at the time. I thought I knew it all. Then I met Rylance and I went, ‘I know bugger all.’ He’s not somebody you ask questions. You just watch, soak it all up.”

Though he saw early critical success in films such as Human Traffic, and worked closely with Harold Pinter in the 2000s, much of Dyer’s later output has been widely panned by critics. But he told the Radio Times that his award winning role in EastEnders, in which he has played landlord Mick Carter since Christmas 2013, saved his career.

“There’s only so many times people are going to forgive you for making a shit film,” said Dyer. “It has saved me ... I would never have been looked at for stuff like Who Do You Think You Are? otherwise. I’d become a laughing stock. I had no money. I couldn’t get work. I was on my arse, but the show was on its arse, so it was a perfect marriage. They said: ‘Danny, we want you to save EastEnders.’”

Dyer added that posher actors would be unable to pull off his performance in the soap, saying that Benedict Cumberbatch would be “useless”.

He continued: “Could he do a cockney accent? Of course he couldn’t. But then I can’t do what Benedict Cumberbatch does. We all do what we can do, whether you’re Idris Elba, whether you’re me. No one else can do what Damian Lewis does, which is why he’s got a career. And no one can do Danny Dyer like I can do Danny Dyer.”