Dacre Montgomery Left Stranger Things Fame Behind and Came Back as a Character Actor

Dacre Montgomery

Photo: iDominick / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 22, 1994 Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Elvis, Power Rangers, Better Watch Out

For most of the shoot of Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, Dacre Montgomery had a wire around his neck, his wrists in cuffs and Bill Skarsgård at his back. He had shaved off his eyebrows. He asked for the cuffs to be tighter and the wire to be real, and he left the set with bruises on his neck and arms. This was the actor who had walked away from Billy Hargrove, the Stranger Things bully who made his face known around the world, and from most of the offers that came with him.

He chose to rebuild from the character-actor end of the business rather than the poster end. With his first film as a director now in the edit, he is about to learn whether that gamble pays.

He grew up in Perth, where he was born on 22 November 1994 to a father from New Zealand and a Canadian mother who both worked in the Australian screen industry. He was performing on stage and on camera by the age of nine. School went badly. He has described being bullied for his weight and for loving theatre, struggling with anxiety from an early age and failing his drama exams, and yet his Year 12 classmates at Mount Lawley Senior High voted him the student most likely to become a Hollywood star. He finished an acting degree at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in 2015.

The first break arrived big. In the 2017 reboot of Power Rangers he played Jason Scott, the Red Ranger who leads the team. “Power Rangers was a big break, but it was also my first break,” he said later, and the distinction mattered: the film opened to mixed reviews and failed at the box office. The same year he made his feature debut in the Australian comedy A Few Less Men and played Jeremy in the Christmas horror film Better Watch Out.

Then came Billy Hargrove. Montgomery joined the second season of Stranger Things as Max’s volatile, abusive stepbrother, and his audition tape went viral. In the third season Billy was killed off, dying after he apologised to his sister. When the pandemic kept him in Australia for the fourth season, he filmed his return from Perth while Shawn Levy directed him over Zoom from America. The role brought an MTV Movie & TV Award nomination and two shared Screen Actors Guild nominations for the ensemble.

Around it he searched. He was the romantic lead, Nick, in The Broken Hearts Gallery, and in Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis he played Steve Binder, the television director who staged Presley’s comeback special. In 2019 he released DKMH, a podcast built from two years of his own poetry, set to music by collaborators. Later he spoke openly about living with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition he said both fuels and hinders him.

And then he left. For nearly four years he went back to Perth and turned offers down. “It can be very exposing and can really breed a fragility that I think I was starting to feel,” he told one interviewer. “I felt like I needed to step away to protect myself.” He has said he wanted to reverse-engineer a career that was being pushed in a commercial direction toward art-house work.

The tidy version of this story is a young star choosing his soul over the machine, and it is worth resisting. The commercial lane had not exactly opened for him: the franchise flopped, and the studio romantic comedy did not make him a leading man. Stepping back was also a way of not competing for parts he might not have won. The method talk that now surrounds his work, with the bruises and the shaved brows and the tighter cuffs, belongs to an old tradition of male actors proving seriousness through discomfort, a tradition critics have learned to distrust. What makes the comeback persuasive is less the suffering than the results on screen.

Those results began with Went Up the Hill, Samuel Van Grinsven’s ghost drama, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024. Montgomery plays Jack, a man who returns to New Zealand for the funeral of the mother who gave him up, and finds her spirit speaking through him and through her widow, played by Vicky Krieps. Van Sant, who remembered his Stranger Things audition tape, then cast him as Richard Hall, the Indianapolis mortgage broker taken hostage by Tony Kiritsis in 1977, opposite Skarsgård with Al Pacino and Colman Domingo in the cast. “Why did Gus think of Bill and I to play two 50-year-olds?” Montgomery wondered aloud. The film premiered at Venice in 2025, reached US cinemas in January 2026 and earned him an AACTA International Award nomination for best supporting actor.

In April 2026 he became the killer in Faces of Death, Daniel Goldhaber’s reimagining of the 1978 shock film. His Arthur Spevak is an internet-obsessed murderer re-staging the original’s deaths online, with Barbie Ferreira as the content moderator who notices. Reviews divided over the film and agreed about him, and the role put him on the shortlist for best supporting performance at the FANGORIA Chainsaw Awards, decided by fan vote and announced on 25 October 2026.

Montgomery has been with the model Liv Pollock since 2017; the couple announced their engagement in December 2023. In January 2026 he signed with Anonymous Content.

The bigger bet is The Engagement Party, his debut as a director, in which he also acts. Written by Jory Anast, co-writer of Went Up the Hill, and produced by a team that includes Nash Edgerton, it follows four old friends on an isolated island whose bonds start to fail over a disputed memory of one night. Lily Sullivan, Abbey Lee and Arlo Green lead the cast. Filming began in Western Australia in October 2025, and the film is now in post-production with no release date announced. “The biggest thing that I’ve been chasing my whole life is directing my first film,” he has said, adding that if it were the last job he ever did, he would be happy.

It will not be the last. He has joined Donnie Yen’s John Wick spinoff Caine in a role still under wraps, he is set to lead Brad Anderson’s psychological thriller Moral Capacity opposite Diane Lane, Tim Robbins and Sofia Boutella, and on 28 January 2027 he arrives as Owen, the arrogant head of a ghost-hunting crew, in the PlayStation game Until Dawn 2. He says he treats every job as if it were his last. The calendar suggests otherwise.

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Tags: actors, Bill Skarsgård, Stranger Things, Gus Van Sant, Dacre Montgomery, Dead Man's Wire, Faces of Death

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