Stranger Things star launches Australian filmmaking career

1 month ago 5

Dacre Montgomery, the Australian actor who broke through in Stranger Things, did not watch the Golden Globes this week. He barely knew it was happening, let alone that Rose Byrne had won for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

Nor has Montgomery joined the tens of millions of viewers around the world who have seen the Stranger Things finale on Netflix.

“I’ve been completely in a bubble,” he said.

The 31-year-old, who played abusive student Billy Hargrove in Stranger Things, finished shooting his first film as director, The Engagement Party, just before Christmas. He has been so deep into editing it, around a brief press tour for a new American film, Gus Van Sant’s hostage thriller Dead Man’s Wire, that the world has passed him by.

“If you ask me any kind of current affair or pop culture thing beyond September, I’d have no idea,” Montgomery said. “I feel like I’ve been in a cave.”

The Engagement Party is a thriller about two couples celebrating at a remote idyllic island whose lives are fractured by a conflicting memory. As well as directing, Montgomery plays one of the four lead roles alongside Abbey Lee, Lily Sullivan and Arlo Green in a film they shot near Margaret River in Western Australia.

“It was the most intense experience of my life,” he said. “With the added component of playing the lead male role – I’m in almost every scene in the film – there was a lot of learning, but it was everything and more that I’d wanted. I absolutely loved it.”

Montgomery, an ambassador for this year’s Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, has stepped out of a Sydney editing suite to launch voting in the audience choice poll. Winners of the country’s favourite Australian TV show, film, actress, actor and podcast will be announced at the awards on the Gold Coast next month.

Alongside director Baz Luhrmann, he will run a workshop for emerging actors at the five-day festival that will take place around the awards.

Montgomery has also been nominated for an AACTA international award for Dead Man’s Wire, which opened strongly in the US last weekend. He is up for best supporting actor in a film against Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein), Benicio del Toro (One Battle After Another), Paul Mescal (Hamnet) and Sean Penn (One Battle After Another).

“It’s my first nomination in Australia, which is really exciting,” he said. “I couldn’t believe the company I’m in. They’re some of my favourite actors and performances.”

Last year Montgomery revealed to this masthead his debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder, and the panic attacks and anxiety that came from being bullied as a heavyset child growing up in Perth.

“I had a lot of energy and I didn’t know where to funnel it, and it left me being a very unhappy kid,” he said. “I had a hard time. I failed drama at high school. I failed media.

“I went home every day, locked myself in my bedroom and just watched movie after movie, TV show after TV show, and it was my escape.”

Actor-director Dacre Montgomery and director of photography Andrew Gough on the set of The Engagement Party near Margaret River, Western Australia, late last year.

Unhappy about where his American career was headed, Montgomery stopped acting for the best part of five years, found a house in Sydney and taught himself to be a filmmaker. He turned down so many well-paid commercial opportunities that his Hollywood agent fired him.

While he hoped to direct a film before he was 30, Montgomery managed it just before his 31st birthday. He then went to the US just after Christmas to promote Dead Man’s Wire, which is yet to get an Australian release date.

Once he finishes editing The Engagement Party, Montgomery hopes to have it debut at a major festival.

“I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” he said. “I just want to do the hard work and get it done.”

Since returning to acting for last year’s New Zealand drama Went up the Hill, Montgomery has also worked on two other overseas films: the horror pic Faces of Death alongside pop star Charli XCX, and the thriller What We Hide.

So does he consider himself a filmmaker now or is acting still his most important job?

“I feel like I’m at a crossroads in many ways in my life coming into my 30s,” Montgomery said. “The thing I like about directing is I have autonomy. I can spend time choosing and crafting every single element of story.

“Acting is my first and greatest love and it feels like there’s so much catharsis in it for me, but you don’t have the same autonomy.”

Meanwhile, AACTA has announced that Sarah Snook, whose work since Succession has included All Her Fault on TV and The Picture of Dorian Gray on stage, will receive its trailblazer award for her international impact and will speak at an In Conversation session at the festival.

Voting for audience choice awards is here.

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