Dacre Montgomery Australian Actor Born 1994 in Perth

Early life

Dacre Montgomery was born on 22 November 1994 in Perth, Western Australia, and began performing on screen and in the theatre when he was nine. He attended Bayswater Primary School and Mount Lawley Senior High School, where fellow students voted him the person most likely to become a Hollywood star. He then studied acting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University and completed his degree in 2015.

Career

His early credits were small. He appeared in Betrand the Terrible as Fred, had a part in a television pilot called Family Tree in 2011, and in 2015 featured in the music video for "Old Souls" by the Australian band Make Them Suffer. He also appeared in A Few Less Men, a sequel to the Australian comedy A Few Best Men.

His first major break was the lead role of Jason Scott, the Red Ranger, in the 2017 reboot of Power Rangers. Also in 2017 he joined the second season of the Netflix series Stranger Things as Billy Hargrove, a volatile and abusive teenager. He returned for the third season in 2019 and appeared in a cameo in the fourth in 2022, which he filmed remotely from Australia while Shawn Levy directed him over a video link during pandemic restrictions. Montgomery has said that the show shaped the opportunities that came afterwards. He also starred in the Christmas horror film Better Watch Out, and in 2020 he starred in the romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Gallery. In 2022 he played Steve Binder in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, a film recorded with a worldwide box office of $272 million.

After Stranger Things he took a break from acting in order to reshape the direction of his career, saying that he wanted to move towards art-house films rather than a commercial path. In 2024 he starred opposite Vicky Krieps in Went Up the Hill, co-written and directed by Samuel Van Grinsven, which premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. In 2025 he co-starred with Bill Skarsgård in Gus Van Sant's Dead Man's Wire. Van Sant has said he cast Montgomery after seeing his audition tape for Stranger Things. Montgomery has described the film as physically demanding, and he shaved off his eyebrows for the role. Also in 2025 he took the part of Reece in What We Hide, and in 2026 he appeared in Faces of Death.

He plans to make his directorial debut with The Engagement Party, in which he also stars; he has called directing a first film the ambition he had chased for most of his life. In September 2025 it was announced that he would play the lead character, James Fisher, in the film Moral Capacity, with Diane Lane, Tim Robbins and Sofia Boutella among the cast. In June 2026 it was announced that he would be part of the cast of the video game Until Dawn 2, and he has said he had been involved in its development for some time.

Outside acting he released a podcast called DKMH on 10 July 2019. It features his own poetry, which he spent two years assembling with the help of musicians who set it to music.

Recognition

For Stranger Things he was nominated for an MTV Movie & TV Award, and with his castmates he received two nominations for the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series.