Netflix made him an overnight sensation but he says fame ‘scared the shit out of me’. Now he’s back with Went Up the Hill – in a role that feels personal
T
wo 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.
