Kamal Ghorui
Dacre Montgomery isn’t shy about using his own struggles to bring characters to life. In ‘Faces of Death,’ his latest horror film, he gets personal, explaining how living with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or widely known as OCD, informed every move and moment of his villain, Arthur, in his new project. Per the ‘Stranger Things’ actor, the role pushed him into one of his darkest performances yet, but instead of trying to hide what makes him tick, Dacre drew straight from it.
Dacre Montgomery’s revelation
Most people know Montgomery as Billy from ‘Stranger Things’, but his new film, ‘Faces of Death’, is a different animal. Here, he plays Arthur, a masked killer who obsessively recreates moments from the infamous 1978 movie, uploading gruesome clips for the world to see. Opposite him is Barbie Ferreira (yes, from ‘Euphoria’) playing a content moderator determined to stop him. But beneath the blood and spectacle, there’s something uncomfortably real about Arthur, an obsession with ritual and control that feels lived-in.Montgomery told People that what made Arthur feel dangerously close to home was his own OCD. “That’s just definitely my thing. I live with that, and I manage it,” he said, not dancing around the reality of it. For the actor, those old, familiar compulsions: the need for order, the fixation on detail, all of it became a strange sort of bridge to the character.He’d always brought a fastidious energy to his roles, but Arthur demanded more. Every action was calculated, every scene tightly wound. “From the time you see him in the movie, he’s halfway to enacting his plan, and he’s put a lot of thought into that,” Montgomery said. He joked he couldn’t relate to the murder, but that bone-deep attention to detail? That was all him.Director Daniel Goldhaber, who co-wrote the movie with Isa Mazzei, said Montgomery’s own quirks deeply shaped Arthur. Goldhaber remembers meeting other actors for the part, but none of them felt right. “Everybody else…they approached this character like somebody else, like something they’d seen in the media. Dacre showed up, and it was like, ‘Here’s all the ways I relate to Arthur personally.’” Suddenly, the character wasn’t just some generic psychopath; he had texture, weird habits, and raw edges.One detail that stuck with Goldhaber was Montgomery’s obsession with the feeling of fabric, a quirk from his real life. During shooting, Montgomery told him he’d spent ten years only sleeping on top of his bed because the smallest wrinkle in the sheets could keep him awake all night. That morphed into Arthur’s fixation with latex and skinsuits, the way he dances and moves while wearing them, elements that weren’t even in the original script, but became central to the character’s unnerving presence. Even the suggestion that wearing latex brings Arthur something close to satisfaction, not from the act of killing, oddly enough, but from the sensation itself, came out of their collaboration.For Montgomery, this wasn’t just a performance. It was a personal exorcism, pouring the anxiety and compulsions he normally hides in everyday life straight into Arthur’s ritualized, chilling acts. The result is a villain that’s not just scary, but disturbingly real.
More on Dacre Montgomery and ‘Faces of Death’
Born in Australia, Montgomery began his career with roles in films like ‘Power Rangers’, where he played the Red Ranger. He later appeared in projects such as ‘Elvis’, where he portrayed the music producer Steve Binder.However, after a while, Montgomery stepped away from Hollywood, and that helped him zero in on roles that meant something to him. ‘Faces of Death’ is very much that: a bold reimagining of the 1978 cult classic, this time set in the digital age. The movie follows a content moderator who stumbles onto a network of people uploading new versions of the film’s violent acts. Montgomery’s Arthur is the masked figure turning horror into performance art, a killer whose obsession is as much about feeling something as it is about being seen.‘Faces of Death’, also featuring Charli XCX, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, and Jermaine Fowler, is out in theaters now.
