Dacre Montgomery
Dacre Montgomery is an actor, born 1994.
Dacre Montgomery grew up in Perth and worked through short films as a teenager before any feature would have him. Then 2017 arrived all at once: A Few Less Men gave him a film debut, Power Rangers made him the Red Ranger, and Stranger Things brought him into its second season as Billy Hargrove.
Billy is the part that matters, and he is a nastier piece of writing than the show's marketing ever admitted. Montgomery played him as a young man performing masculinity at a volume that hurts to sit through, all clenched jaw and lazy contempt, and then let the performance curdle rather than soften as the seasons went on. He held the role from 2017 to 2022 while the ensemble around him swelled to an unmanageable size, which is its own kind of achievement: he stayed legible in a cast that stopped being one.
Everything else has been smaller and more scattered. Better Watch Out in 2017 is a genuinely mean Christmas thriller and the best use anyone has made of him outside Hawkins. The Broken Hearts Gallery in 2020 asks him to be pleasant, which he can do. Elvis in 2022 gives him a few scenes as Steve Binder in a very loud film. The next real test is a cluster of recent and imminent work: What We Hide in 2025, and two 2026 features, Dead Man's Wire and Faces of Death.
Movies (9)
TV (2)
Where to start with Dacre Montgomery
Billy Hargrove is the whole case, so begin with Stranger Things and watch how little Montgomery softens him. He is playing the only genuinely unpleasant human being in a series otherwise stuffed with lovable kids, and he refuses the easy warmth for a very long time.
After that, Better Watch Out is the real find: a small, vicious Christmas horror film running on the same fuel as Billy, with far more room to move. Power Rangers is a competent studio reboot and he is fine in it, no more than that. Elvis is worth it to see what he does with a handful of scenes in somebody else's spectacle, and The Broken Hearts Gallery is the one where he gets to relax, which is rare enough to be interesting. A Few Less Men is only for people curious about where it started.