The Aussie Stranger Things star who was fired for chasing his indie dreams

2 weeks ago 4

The obsessive compulsive disorder. The panic attacks. The anxiety that comes from being bullied as a child.

On a rainy Wednesday afternoon at an old-style pub, tucked away in a former bottle shop lined with grimy band posters for the likes of the Whitlams, Silverchair and Powderfinger, Australian actor Dacre Montgomery – of Stranger Things fame – is talking very personally.

“I have the lowest self-esteem ever,” he says. “I’m scared of everything.”

Once mental health was a taboo subject for just about anyone, let alone a young actor talking about a new film. It’s especially unexpected given Montgomery’s image since he broke through playing Billy Hargrove – an abusive student at Hawkins High and flirtatious lifeguard – in the hit Netflix series eight years ago.

His moody good looks and dapper moustache made the Perth-raised actor a teen heart-throb whose Instagram fan pages have such swooning names as “lovelydacre” and “dacremontgomeryseyes”. (His first name, by the way, rhymes with “acre” and is an old family surname.)

He was on magazine covers and in fashion ads with a cool young actor image, only enhanced when he turned up on red carpets with then-model girlfriend Liv Pollock, and released a podcast setting his own beat poetry to music.

His Year 12 classmates at Mount Lawley Senior High seemed to be on the money when they voted him “the most likely student to become a Hollywood star”.

But like so much in entertainment, the image belies the reality.

Montgomery didn’t like where his career was heading, so he stepped back from acting for the best part of five years.

After the third season of Stranger Things, when Billy becomes possessed by the malevolent Mind Flayer, he was in the 2020 romcom The Broken Hearts Gallery. He had a 2022 guest role as a hallucination in the fourth season of Stranger Things. The same year, he had a small part as concert movie director Steve Binder in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.

But Montgomery turned down so many well-paid commercial opportunities that his Hollywood agent fired him. Instead, he wanted to work on arthouse projects with auteur directors that mattered to him.

Dacre Montgomery and Vicki Krieps in Went up the Hill.

What he calls re-engineering his career - with a more supportive agent - seems to have worked. At 30, Montgomery is returning to the limelight with two new films this month: Australian-based Kiwi director Samuel Van Grinsven’s intense drama Went up the Hill (opening in cinemas) and American Gus Van Sant’s true crime drama Dead Man’s Wire (premiering at the Venice International Film Festival).

He has also shot two more arthouse American films and, once the last piece of the financing puzzle is in place, will make his directing debut with The Engagement Party, which he will also produce and star in.

Rather than play into his former image, Montgomery wants to be upfront about exactly who he is. That means being open about his mental health.

“I suffer from really, really debilitating OCD,” he says, tucked into a black puffer jacket under a black cap in the Old Clare Hotel on Sydney’s Broadway. It’s so debilitating that Montgomery has every light bulb in his home in the eastern suburbs with a geolocated timer for sunrise and sunset to control the light levels.

“I’m really specific about light, about space, about colour,” he says. “Every single skirting board, ceiling and wall is painted the same colour so I can focus. I’m just very spectrum … I get stuck in a channel of thought where I’m locking and unlocking the door five or six times because it isn’t right.”

It’s ironic that his Stranger Things character is a bully, because Montgomery was bullied for being heavyset as a boy. It didn’t help that he was interested in drama, encouraged by parents who worked in the film industry. His dad, Scott, was a sound recordist; his mum, Judith, was a first assistant director and production co-ordinator who switched careers to become, like her father, a psychologist. Montgomery’s younger sister, Saskia, is also studying to be a psychologist.

“I had a lot of energy and I didn’t know where to funnel it, and it left me being a very unhappy kid,” Montgomery says. “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. I knew I wanted to be an actor but I didn’t have clarity in myself and it led me to be very unhappy and very anxious a lot of the time.”

Montgomery now sees this anxiety is a positive in his life. “It fuels my work ethic and my ambition as a kid,” he says.

Dacre Montgomery as Billy in Stranger Things.

I first interviewed Montgomery with Van Grinsven at the Adelaide Film Festival before the Australian premiere of Went up the Hill last year. He plays Jack, who goes to a remote home in New Zealand for the funeral of his estranged mother, Elizabeth; Vicky Krieps (The Phantom Thread) plays Jill, his mother’s lover.

As they get to know each other, they are alternately possessed by Elizabeth. Van Grinsven calls it a ghost story – “a three-hander told with two actors”. Atmospheric and poetic, it’s a film about grief.

Montgomery mentioned in Adelaide that shooting the film was so raw and confronting that he had a panic attack entering the brutally stark house where most of the film is set for the first time.

He jumped in his car and drove to Christchurch – a response, he said, to going deep into Jack’s character, playing an Australian for the first time since the start of his career and revisiting a “complicated” relationship with his father’s side of the family in New Zealand.

“I have a lot in common with Jack,” he says. “Going to New Zealand – I have Kiwi family – was a bit of a pilgrimage to confront some stuff that I’ve gone through … a lot of real world Dacre stuff crossed the line into Jack and Elizabeth and Went up the Hill. That led to a lot of panic attacks, a lot of meltdowns, a lot of turmoil”.

Van Grinsven (Sequin in a Blue Room) says he was taken aback by Montgomery’s “vulnerability and his honesty and how raw he was as a person” in their first phone call about the film.

“There’s a lot Dacre the person in this character,” he says. “He really is such a remarkable talent but he works from a place that’s very personal to him. When the character is going through something as intense as they do in the film, sometimes understandably it gets a bit overwhelming.”

Dacre Montgomery, centre, with Ludi Lin, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler and Becky G in Power Rangers.

Van Grinsven made sure his two stars decompressed after intense scenes. A fire pit at the back of the house was where they hung out to “talk about what we were dealing with in the scene and slowly come back to ourselves and what’s actually happening right now”.

Even before Montgomery finished studying at Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), whose famous graduates include Hugh Jackman, Francis O’Connor, Jai Courtney, Lisa McCune and Tim Minchin, his Hollywood career was under way. A self-tape for another project attracted interest during casting for the 2017 reboot Power Rangers.

“They flew me to LA and I tested for the lead of this big franchise – four picture deal, $US100 million film – and booked the role,” he says. “I was very lucky. I came home, turned 21, graduated university then a couple of months later got on a plane to Canada and started my first film.

“I went from not knowing anything to having to work 17 hours a day, six days a week, leading a film.”

Montgomery played Jason Scott, a high school football quarterback who becomes the Red Power Ranger.

When the film opened to disappointing box office, scotching the three sequels in his contract, Montgomery was already shooting Stranger Things. He joined the series in season two and, when it landed on Netflix, everything changed.

“I lost my anonymity kind of overnight,” Montgomery says. “Netflix is worldwide. A show like that can come out all episodes at once and you’ve got [almost 100 million] households watching it. There’s nothing like that kind of life-changing moment and it freaked me out.

“I’d put so much work into the show and the character – and time thinking about the craft of what I was doing – then suddenly I had all this attention.”

Montgomery’s role was expanded in season three, then he began to step back from stardom. Commercials and endorsements meant he could keep paying his bills. So what did he do for all those years?

“I made a lot of short films,” he says. “I was teaching myself how to edit, how to write, teaching myself about photography, how a camera works. How can I be expected to direct a film if I don’t understand the other departments?

“To answer without sounding cryptic, I just watched a hell of a lot of movies and television. I really went into this artistic bubble. I want to focus on my relationship with my friends and my family, I want to stay true to who I am, and that required me to just go and live life.”

Once Montgomery found a film he wanted to act in – he read the script for Went up the Hill three times on a plane then wrote to Van Grinsven saying how moved he was – other projects followed.

He shot Faces of Death with director Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow up a Pipeline) alongside pop star Charli XCX and Dan Kay’s What We Hide opposite McKenna Grace (The Handmaid’s Tale).

Montgomery has been in Venice for the world premiere of Dead Man’s Wire, which is based on a real-life crime in the 1970s. “It’s sort of the Luigi Mangione story and I play the CEO of an evil company and Bill Skarsgard plays a guy holding me hostage,” he says. “Al Pacino plays my dad and Colman Domingo, who was nominated for an Oscar this year for Sing Sing, plays the disc jockey that narrates the film.”

While yet to be announced, Montgomery is also down to shoot a psychological thriller which he describes as “Memento meets Inception meets Shutter Island”.

But first, he hopes to direct The Engagement Party. It’s a drama about two couples celebrating at a remote idyllic island whose lives are fractured by a conflicting memory. Written by Went up the Hill’s Jory Anast, it will also star Abbey Lee, Lily Sullivan and Arlo Green. The plan is to shoot it in Western Australia near Margaret River.

Montgomery thinks his OCD will be an asset when he directs.

“Film is the most specific thing,” he says. “You’ve got 100 people working to one frame and it’s all about specificity. The best directors I’ve worked with are specific. Everything is in the detail.

“I’m really interested in people that have a similar brain to me and that’s often in the film industry and artists in particular. I’m a total advocate for using mental health as a superpower.

“That makes me who I am. It’s not really that stuff [that’s important]. It’s what you do with it. It’s what I do with my OCD, my anxieties, my failures, my ‘when I get knocked off my confidence and knocked off my feet a bit’.”

Turning 30 was no big deal for him.

“I’ve felt like I was 42 since I was 12,” Montgomery says. “I just feel like I’m ageing into myself. Thirty feels fine.”

Went up the Hill opens in cinemas on September 11.

Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.

Read Entire Article