Dacre Montgomery on Dead Man’s Wire and Stranger Things

There’s a particular way Dacre Montgomery answers questions.

He’s not evasive, but circuitous, like someone walking the perimeter of a truth before deciding how to enter it.

He starts somewhere unexpected, drifts into tangents, then loops back with startling precision to land exactly where he meant to go all along. It’s the conversational equivalent of his career: seemingly wandering, but actually following some internal compass invisible to everyone else.

When we meet to discuss “Dead Man’s Wire,” Gus Van Sant’s darkly comedic exploration of America’s media obsession, Montgomery is five days removed from wrapping his directorial debut. He’s been editing in the car on the way over to the Variety offices. There’s an intensity to him, barely contained, like someone who’s discovered they have more to say than any single medium can hold.

“Gus definitely feels like my spirit animal,” Montgomery says, with a boyish earnestness. He recounts how Van Sant called him out of nowhere about playing one of the leads: Dick Cole, a 55-year-old man, opposite Bill Skarsgård’s 48-year-old character.

Montgomery is 30, Australian, and built nothing like the real-life Cole. “I was like, this is really interesting,” he says with characteristic understatement. “But I think what I learned in the meeting is just how kind, pure, unfiltered, and creative a spirit that Gus is.”

It’s that unfiltered quality Montgomery keeps returning to — in Van Sant, in the actors he admires, in the kind of artist he’s trying to become. He describes the auteur as someone who “just kind of follows his gut in the purest way,” reading the script and immediately thinking: “When it’s Dacre and Bill.”

The film itself — about two men who become unlikely media sensations during a 1977 kidnapping — functions as both a period piece and a mirror. “It’s fascinating as an Australian to watch the news cycle out of the U.S.,” Montgomery observes, mentioning recent political events with an archness that suggests he sees the patterns Van Sant is illuminating.

“I think it’s, unfortunately, extremely topical.”

But he’s quick to note how the film’s sly comedic elements make it more than mere commentary: “It subverts your expectations, and it makes the film more accessible than it otherwise would be.”

Since “Stranger Things” made him recognizable nearly a decade ago, playing Max’s brother who becomes an unwilling host of the Mind Flayer, Montgomery has worked sporadically, appearing in only a handful of projects. It’s the selective approach that can read as precious or privileged, at least at first glance, depending on your generosity.

But listening to Montgomery explain it, something else emerges. “I am process driven, not outcome driven,” he says with the conviction of someone who’s had to defend this position before. “I never go and watch the movie beyond one time at the premiere. It’s not about the outcome. It’s not about the box office or the streaming thing; people like it, don’t like it. It’s not part of my process.”

He pauses, making sure the point lands.

“I’ve taken the last six, seven years off, and just did one other film with Vicky Krieps, which was ‘She Came Up the Hill’ before Gus’s film. And that film changed my life.”

It’s a radical position in an industry that measures everything by metrics, and Montgomery knows it. But he’s not being contrarian for its own sake. There’s a vulnerability beneath the stance, one he eventually articulates through an unexpected story about reconnecting with his grandmother in New Zealand.

After finishing “She Came Up the Hill,” he spent a week with her and realized something he’d been avoiding: “I feel like I absorb a lot of people’s energies. With ‘Stranger Things,’ because of the subscriber base of Netflix, overnight, my whole life changes.”

His admission hangs in the air.

“I realized all I’m pursuing is trying to be an actor because I love movies. I haven’t been pursuing it because I wanted to get known or to get money. I was suddenly really vulnerable to a lot of different energies that I felt insecure about, self-conscious, and I got more and more self-conscious about myself.”

He needed time, he explains, to “figure out about myself and what I wanted to do and find the right roles and the right directors that were true and honest.”

I see Dacre Montgomery now, at least I think I do. The six-year gap wasn’t laziness or pickiness. On the contrary, it was survival.

“I wanted that authenticity in the projects,” he says. “I’m not going to give all of myself to just anybody. I want to feel pure.”

When he talks about his directorial debut — a four-person, single-location drama called “The Engagement Party” — the same careful articulation gives way to something more urgent and lively.

“There’s nothing else I wanted to do,” he says about reading the script. “The only story I need to tell, this is the only thing I need to do with my life, and if it’s the last thing I do with my life, I’m happy. That’s how I feel about everything: no in between. It’s zero or 1000.”

The all-or-nothing mentality isn’t posturing. Montgomery describes keeping a list of things he’s wanted to try in a movie since he was young, filling his first film with everything he’s been storing up. “A lot of people were like, ‘What the fuck is going on? He’s a lot,” he says with a laugh. “I am very intense.”

But then, more seriously, he shares: “I feel like I’m in this phase where I want to push myself. I don’t ever want to plateau. I want to try the next thing and try to push myself further creatively.”

He’s aware of how this intensity might read.

“I think it’s hard,” he admits. “People say, ‘You have opportunities, why don’t you take them? You’re lucky. Shut up and be lucky.’”

He acknowledges all those perspectives without letting them change his course. “I’m not out here trying to do anything for anyone. Not to prove them wrong or prove them right. I’m on my journey, doing it for me.”

As for “Stranger Things,” now in its fifth season with four episodes left to air on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, Montgomery is gracious but eager to shift the focus.

When asked if fans should expect him or anything in the final episodes, he demurs.

What excites him is what comes after: “The Duffer Brothers have all this other stuff they want to do, and that’s the bit I’m most excited for. The after, other IP, other stories, other things that for years they’ve been talking about.”

Of course, he won’t answer if he appears in the finale.

Nonetheless, he has a glass-half-full perspective about the industry’s evolution, uninterested in nostalgia for how things used to be.

Near the end of our conversation, Montgomery mentions calling three of Australia’s greatest living directors before starting production on his directorial film. They all had one standard message for Montgomery: “No one’s perfect. You will make mistakes, but own the mistakes. Show the actors, and show the crew that you are figuring it out.”

It was liberating, he says, to realize “I can’t control everything. I can’t control every outcome. Maybe there’s magic in that.”

It’s the closest he comes to articulating what ties everything together — Van Sant’s instinctual casting, the years spent searching for authentic projects, the all-consuming dive into directing.

Montgomery isn’t trying to build a conventional career or become a movie star in any traditional sense. He’s only trying to stay true to his internal definition of what matters, even when he can’t fully explain it to anyone else, maybe not even himself.

“At the end of the day,” he says, searching for the right words, “Why did I lose my mind over this thing, if it’s not really about being the project?” He catches himself mid-tangent, then decides to push through anyway. “I’m going off track, but I guess the point is, I wanted that authenticity in the projects.”

I don’t think he’s off track at all. He’s exactly where he means to be — somewhere between certainty and discovery, giving everything to the process and nothing to the outcome, following his gut like Van Sant taught him, like his grandmother understood, like he’s been trying to do all along. The “magic,” as he puts it, might be in not knowing exactly where you’re going and just knowing that getting there, honestly, is the only thing that matters.

“Dead Man’s Wire” will be distributed by Row K Entertainment and opens in limited release on Jan. 9, 2026.