Dacre Montgomery made his name as a boy about to go off, and his most interesting work since has come from not going off. In Dead Man's Wire he plays a frightened, colourless hostage and makes the colourlessness do the work.
Fi1m perspective
In Dead Man's Wire (2026), Dacre Montgomery spends most of the film in a room with Bill Skarsgård's Kiritsis, and he does almost nothing. Richard Hall is a decent, frightened man with nothing much to say for himself, and Montgomery plays him that way rather than inventing a spine the man may not have had. He listens, he agrees, he waits. It is the least showy thing an actor can do on screen, and here it is what keeps the other man talking.
That is a strange place to find him, because the part that made his name was the opposite. Billy Hargrove, the mulleted bully of Stranger Things (2017–2019, with a brief return in 2022), was a face that looked ready to hit someone, and Montgomery has been offered variations on him since: troubled young men with a temper and something soft underneath. Before that there were short films and theatre as a child, a feature debut in A Few Less Men (2017) and the Red Ranger in the Power Rangers reboot the same year, his first lead in a film. The commercial phase did not last. There were supporting parts in Better Watch Out (2017) and The Broken Hearts Gallery (2020), and a small one as Steve Binder in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis (2022), where we hardly noticed him, which in a Luhrmann film is not necessarily the actor's fault.
Then he stopped, or nearly. For several years he took little major work, and when he came back it was to smaller and stranger films: the lead in Went Up the Hill (2024), a possession drama about trauma, then Dead Man's Wire, for which he was cast from a self-tape, and Faces of Death (2026). He has explained the gap himself: "I grew up watching auteur films. I wanted characters that challenged me to the greatest extent." On the evidence of Gus Van Sant's film, the challenge he chose was to be dull on purpose and trust the director to see why.
What he has that the brooding-young-man casting only half uses is patience. The Hargrove reputation is for a face about to go off; the Hall performance is a face that has decided not to. We expected the hostage to bore us, frankly, and he did not: watching a man work out, minute by minute, that agreeing is safer than speaking turned out to be its own small suspense. The film is still Skarsgård's, and we said so at the time. But the quiet one is doing more than it looks.
He is now preparing to direct, with The Engagement Party, and we will see whether the patience carries over to the other side of the camera. As an actor, the useful lesson of Dead Man's Wire is a simple one: he is better when the part does not ask him to look dangerous.
Biography
Dacre Montgomery is an Australian actor. Born Dacre Kayd Montgomery-Harvey on 22 November 1994 in Perth, Western Australia, he trained at the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts.
He made his feature debut in A Few Less Men (2017) and that year also appeared in Power Rangers as Jason Scott, the Red Ranger, and began playing Billy Hargrove in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2017–2022). Subsequent credits include Better Watch Out (2017), The Broken Hearts Gallery (2020) and Elvis (2022), in which he played Steve Binder. He is cast as Richard Hall in Dead Man's Wire (2026).
