Dacre Montgomery isn’t shy about using his own struggles to bring the characters to life. In Faces of Death, his latest horror film, he gets personal, showing how living with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or more widely known as OCD, influenced every step and moment of his villain, Arthur, in his new project.
According to the Stranger Things actor, the role pushed him into one of his darkest performances yet, but instead of trying to hide what interests him, Dacre drew directly from it.
Discovery of Dacre Montgomery
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 recreates moments from the infamous 1978 film, uploading gruesome clips for the world to see. He’s confronted by Barbie Ferreira (yes, from Euphoria), who plays a content moderator determined to stop him. But beneath the blood and spectacle, there’s something genuinely uncomfortable about Arthur, an obsession with ritual and control in which he seems to live.
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Montgomery told People magazine that what made Arthur feel dangerously close to home was his OCD. “That’s definitely what matters to me,” he said, without dancing around the reality of it. “I live with that, I get by.” For the actor, those old, familiar impulses: the need for order, the focus on detail, became a strange bridge to the character.He always brought a fastidious energy to his roles, but Arthur asked for more.
Every action was calculated, every scene tightly wound. “From the time you see him on film, he’s halfway to enacting his plan, and he’s put a lot of thought into it,” Montgomery said. He joked that he couldn’t relate to the murder, but such deep attention to detail? This was all his.exit
Daniel Goldhaber
Montgomery’s quirks are what profoundly shaped Arthur, said he, who co-wrote the film with Issa Mazi. Goldhaber remembers meeting other actors for the role, but none of them felt right.
“Everyone… treated this character like someone else, like something they saw in the media. Dacre showed up, and was like, ‘These are all the ways I relate to Arthur personally.'” Suddenly, the character wasn’t just a generic psychopath; he had textures and strange habits and raw edges.One detail that stuck with Goldhaber was Montgomery’s obsession with the texture of fabric, which was foreign to his real life.
During filming, Montgomery told him that he had only spent ten years sleeping on top of his bed because the smallest wrinkle in the sheets could keep him up all night. This turned into Arthur’s penchant for latex and leather suits, and the way he danced and moved while wearing them, elements that weren’t even present in the original script, but which became essential to the character’s unnerving presence.
Even the suggestion that wearing latex brought something close to satisfaction for Arthur, not from the act of killing, oddly enough, but from the sensation itself, came from their collaboration.For Montgomery, this wasn’t just a performance. It was a personal exorcism, pouring the anxiety and compulsions he usually harbored in everyday life directly into Arthur’s terrifying rituals. The result is a villain who is not only frightening, but disturbingly real.
More about Dacre Montgomery and the “Faces of Death”
Born in Australia, Montgomery began his career with roles in films such as “Power Rangers,” where he played the Red Ranger. He later appeared in projects such as “Elvis”, where he portrayed music producer Steve Bender.However, after a while, Montgomery moved away from Hollywood, which helped him focus on roles that meant something to him. “Faces of Death” is pretty much just that: a bold reimagining of the 1978 classic, this time set in the digital age. The film follows a content moderator who stumbles upon a network of people uploading new versions of the violence in the film. Montgomery’s Arthur is the masked figure who turns horror into performance art, a killer whose obsession is as much about feeling something as it is about seeing it.Faces of Death, which also stars Charli XCX, Josie Totah, Aaron Holiday and Jermaine Fowler, is in theaters now.
