Dacre Montgomery has a special way of answering questions.
He is not evasive, but circuitous, like someone who walks around the truth before deciding how to enter it.
He starts out unexpectedly, drifts off on a tangent, and then loops back with amazing precision to land exactly where he was trying to go all along. That’s his career’s worth of conversations. Although they appear to be wandering, they are actually following an internal compass that is invisible to others.
Montgomery was five days away from completing his directorial debut when director Gus Van Sant met him to discuss Dead Man’s Wire, a darkly comedic exploration of American media obsession. He was editing in his car on the way to the Variety magazine office. There’s a barely contained intensity to him, like someone who realizes they have more to say than can be expressed in a single medium.
“Gus definitely feels like my spirit animal,” Montgomery says with boyish earnestness. He said Van Sant got a call out of nowhere about playing one of the leads, Dick Cole, a 55-year-old man opposite Bill Skarsgård’s 48-year-old counterpart.
Montgomery is 30 years old and Australian, but he bears no resemblance to the real-life Cole. “I thought this was really interesting,” he said with characteristic understatement. “But I think what I learned from this meeting was how kind, pure, unfiltered and creative Gus is.”
It’s an unfiltered quality that Montgomery keeps returning to, in Van Sant, in the actors he admires and in the kind of artists he strives to become. He described the writer as someone who “follows his instincts in the purest way,” and as soon as he read the script, he thought, “When it comes to Dacre and Bill.”
The film itself, about two men whose 1977 kidnapping became a media sensation, serves as both a historical drama and a mirror. “As an Australian, it’s interesting to watch the news cycle from the United States,” Montgomery said, referring to recent political events with an artistry that suggests he understands the pattern Van Sant is revealing.
“Unfortunately, I think this is very topical.”
But he was quick to point out that the film’s sly comedic elements make it more than just commentary, saying, “It subverts your expectations and makes the film more approachable than it would otherwise be.”
Since his rise to fame on Stranger Things nearly a decade ago, when he played the younger brother of Max, who becomes the unwilling host of the Mind Flayer, Montgomery has worked sporadically, appearing in only a handful of films. This is a selective approach that can be interpreted as valuable or privileged, at least at first glance, depending on your generosity.
But listening to Montgomery’s explanation, something else emerges. “I’m process-driven, not results-driven,” he says with the conviction of someone who once had to hold this position. “I don’t go see a movie more than once at a premiere. It’s not about the outcome. It’s not about box office or streaming. People either love it or hate it. That’s not part of my process.”
He paused to make sure the point landed.
“I’ve been on vacation for the last six or seven years, and I just did another movie with Vicki Krieps before the Gus movie, and that was ‘She Come Up the Hill,’ and that movie changed my life.”
In an industry where everything is measured by metrics, this is a fundamental position, and Montgomery knows it. But he’s not a contrarian for its own sake. There is a vulnerability underlying this stance, which he ultimately articulates through an unexpected story about his reunion with his grandmother in New Zealand.
After he finished watching “She Come Up the Hill,” he spent a week with her and realized he had been avoiding her. “I feel like I tap into a lot of people’s energy. With ‘Stranger Things,’ my entire life changed overnight because of Netflix’s subscriber base.”
His confession is up in the air.
“I realized that I was only pursuing acting because I love movies. I wasn’t pursuing acting because I wanted to be known or get paid. All of a sudden, I became really vulnerable to different energies, and I became anxious and self-conscious, and I became more and more self-conscious about myself.”
He explains that he needed time to “understand myself and what I wanted to do and find the right role and the right director who was honest and honest.”
I’m seeing Dacre Montgomery right now, at least that’s what I think. The six year gap wasn’t due to laziness or picky eating. On the contrary, it was survival.
“I wanted authenticity to the project,” he says. “I don’t intend to give all of myself to anyone. I want to remain pure.”
When he talks about his directorial debut, “The Engagement Party,” a four-character, one-location drama, the same politeness gives way to something more urgent and vivid.
“There was nothing else I wanted to do,” he says of when he read the script. “This is the only story I have to tell, this is the only thing I have to do in my life, and if it’s the last thing I do in my life, I’m happy. That’s how I feel about everything. There’s no middle ground. It’s zero or a thousand.”
An “all or nothing” mindset is not correct. Montgomery says that from a young age he made a list of things he wanted to try in movies and packed everything he had saved up into his first film. “A lot of people were like, ‘What the hell is going on? He’s amazing,'” he says with a laugh. “I’m so intense.”
But more seriously, he shares: “I feel like I’m at this stage where I want to push myself. I never want to be stagnant. I want to try the next thing and push myself further creatively.”
He knows how this intensity is read.
“I think that’s difficult,” he admits. “People say, ‘You have an opportunity, why don’t you take it? You’re lucky. Shut up and be lucky.’
He acknowledges all those points of view without changing his policies. “I’m not here trying to do anything for anyone. I’m not here to prove them wrong or prove them right. I’m on this journey for myself.”
“Dead Man’s Wire”. Photo credit Stefania Rosini/Row K Entertainment
Stefania Rosini/Row K Entertainment
“Stranger Things” is currently in its fifth season, with the remaining four episodes scheduled to air on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, but Montgomery, politely, wants to shift the focus.
When asked if fans should expect anything from him or the final episode, he demurred.
What he’s excited about is what happens next. “The Duffer Brothers have a lot of other things they want to do. And that’s the part I’m most excited about. Then other IPs, other stories, other things they’ve been talking about for years.”
Of course, he won’t answer even if he appears in the final episode.
Nevertheless, he has a semi-perfect view of the evolution of the industry and has no interest in being nostalgic about how things used to be.
Near the end of our conversation, Montgomery mentioned that he called three of Australia’s greatest living directors before starting work on a film he directed. All had a standard message for Montgomery. “Nobody’s perfect. You make mistakes, but they’re yours. Show the actors and the crew that you understand that.”
He says it was liberating to realize, “You can’t control everything. You can’t control all outcomes. Maybe there’s magic in that.”
It’s the closest he gets to articulating what ties everything together: Van Sant’s intuitive casting, the years he spent searching for authentic projects, and his all-consuming commitment to directing.
Montgomery isn’t trying to have a traditional career or become a movie star in the traditional sense. He’s just trying to stay true to his inner definition of what’s important, even if he can’t quite explain it to others, perhaps even to himself.
“Why am I going crazy over this when it’s not really about the project at the end of the day?” he said, searching for the right words. He caught himself mid-tangential and decided to push through anyway. “This is off-topic, but I think the important thing is that we wanted the project to be authentic.”
I don’t think he’s completely off track. He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. Somewhere between conviction and discovery, he’s all about the process, thinking nothing of the outcome, following his intuition, as Van Sant taught him, as his grandmother understood, as he always tried to do. Maybe the “magic” he’s talking about is not knowing exactly where you’re going, but honestly knowing that all that matters is getting there.
Dead Man’s Wire will be distributed by Row K Entertainment and will be released in limited release on January 9, 2026.
