Two years after Stranger Things transformed the Australian actor Dacre Montgomery into an overnight heart-throb at 22, he retreated home to Perth. From there he said no to every role that came his way for four years, bar a season-four cameo and a small part in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis.
“I lost my anonymity overnight and it scared the shit out of me,” Montgomery, now 30, says. He speaks fast and taps the table in time with those last words, a brimmed cap sitting low over his face. “That was a big driving force for stepping back.”
We’re in a Sydney bar on a quiet Wednesday in the lead-up to the release of Went Up the Hill – an icy possession drama set in New Zealand’s Southern Alps by the Australian writer-director Samuel van Grinsven. It stars Montgomery alongside Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps as a pair of strangers whose relationship grows increasingly antic as they mourn a mutual relative.
It’s the first of a series of anticipated films starring Montgomery, including a remake of the 70s mondo horror Faces of Death, alongside Barbie Ferreira and Charli xcx, as well as Gus van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire, a true-crime thriller about the 1977 kidnapping of a mortgage broker that premiered at Venice to glowing reviews. It’s a sharp reversal from a few years ago, when his frustrated Hollywood agent dropped him.
“I needed to stop and recalibrate,” he says. “I also [knew] that I wanted more and I had more to give.”
Montgomery’s ascent didn’t allow for contemplation. He landed his first major role – leading 2017’s unsuccessful Power Rangers film reboot – before he finished his acting degree at the prestigious Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts.
Though a four-film deal disappeared after Power Rangers’ meagre box office take, it didn’t matter. Months later hundreds of millions of Netflix subscribers tuned into Stranger Things’ second season starring Montgomery as Billy Hargrove, Hawkins’ mulleted bad boy lifeguard and eventual literal demon.
Brooding, handsome and evil, Montgomery’s live-wire performance captured a passionate fanbase – the type that meant he could get a quarter of a million likes on a low-res Instagram post of a blue-black gradient shared to more than 7 million followers. The attention was overwhelming but Montgomery also questioned where his career was heading.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love commercial films,” he says. “But I grew up watching auteur films. I wanted characters that challenged me to the greatest extent.”
In the wake of Stranger Things, those characters didn’t come. “So I waited. And waited. And waited.”
With commercial and endorsement work steady, Montgomery experimented. He released a beat-inspired poetry podcast and book, both titled DKMH (after his full name, Dacre Kaye Montgomery-Harvey), and directed a handful of high-concept short films, ranging from sci-fi to viscerally violent works about motherhood.
But he credits his return to Went Up the Hill, in which he plays Jack, a young queer man who arrives in New Zealand to attend the funeral of his estranged abusive mother, Elizabeth, and meets her wife, Jill (Krieps), for the first time. They cloister themselves in Elizabeth’s house as her spirit possesses each of their bodies. The presence is welcome but menacing, as Jack and Jill try to understand her abuse without falling victim to it again.
Montgomery was instantly drawn to the acting challenge of a “three-hander told by two people”, as well as the script’s exploration of inherited trauma.
“My mum had really bad postnatal depression when I was born,” he says. “I think a lot of my anxieties come from that. So it feels a part of me, in a weird way.
“And then, in some ways, my anxiety is the fire that fuels my ambition or my work ethic. It’s part of me, her trauma.”
Van Grinsven says Montgomery was cast because of his “dangerous” onscreen presence. It’s the same intensity he exudes his viral Stranger Things audition, in which he dances shirtless to Come on Eileen between scenes, though comments focus more on his intense stare – also the subject of many TikTok videos.
“He feels like he could explode at any moment,” Van Grinsven says. “And coupled with how beautifully raw and sensitive he is as a real person, that together felt really interesting to me in a film [about] the abused welcoming an abuser into their body.”
Shot on location at Flock Hill Lodge, a five-star resort overlooking Lake Pearson that hadn’t yet opened, the cast and crew were incredibly isolated – and cold. Pulling from New Zealand’s rich cinema of unease, the mountainous landscape is as haunted as the lodge, a gorgeous outpost of concrete, glass and wood creaking in the wind.
“I liken it to The Shining, right?” Montgomery says. “I would have nightmares all night, so I didn’t sleep the whole production … We were all going crazy.”
Montgomery struggled to shake the film until its premiere last September at Toronto international film festival. “I just bawled my eyes out the whole film, because there’s so much of me and Vicky in there. I felt like I shed it that night. I was like, ‘I’m done. I never have to watch the film again.’”
From there, the floodgates opened. In addition to his upcoming acting credits, Montgomery is also aiming to shoot his directorial feature debut The Engagement Party this year in Western Australia.
Penned by Went Up the Hill’s co-writer Jory Anast, it’s a relationship drama about two couples on a remote holiday who are forced to examine a murky shared memory. “I’m brimming with ideas, and a lot of the heads of department we have on board are like, ‘Woah, you’re intense. You’re a lot,” he says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘What are you gonna do?’”
