When the second season of Stranger Things premiered in 2017, Dacre Montgomery was 22 and suddenly everywhere. His electrifying performance as Billy Hargrove made him an overnight breakout, the kind of actor people Googled before the credits finished. And then, at the height of it all, he did something almost unheard of for a rising star: He walked away.

The Australian actor went home to Perth. He turned down every offer that came his way for nearly four years. And for a while, that was the plan. He’d had a taste of what global attention felt like — and it rattled him in ways he didn’t immediately have the language for. “It can be very exposing and can really breed a fragility that I think I was starting to feel,” he tells Yahoo. “I felt like I needed to step away to protect myself.”

But there are certain names capable of pulling a person out of a self-imposed hiatus, and one of them is director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Milk).

Montgomery, now 31, stars in Dead Man’s Wire, a darkly funny, slow-burning hostage thriller that marks Van Sant’s first feature in seven years. Van Sant called the actor out of the blue after seeing Montgomery’s audition self-tape from Stranger Things. (Apparently, it's legendary in the acting community.) The director wanted Montgomery to star opposite Bill Skarsgård, 35, in the film, inspired by a true crime that unfolded in 1977. (Read Yahoo film critic Brett Arnold’s review here.)

“Honestly, my first thought [when I got the call] was, Why did Gus think of Bill and I to play two 50-year-olds?” Montgomery laughs. (The real-life figures involved were both men in their 50s.)

Dead Man’s Wire, in select theaters Friday and out nationwide on Jan. 16, revisits the kidnapping of a powerful banker, Richard “Dick” Hall (Montgomery), and the standoff that quickly captured the nation’s attention. Skarsgård portrays the desperate man behind it — a figure who, amid a swelling media frenzy, became an unlikely folk hero. As coverage intensified, the situation turned into a public spectacle, blurring the lines between desperation, defiance and justice in ways that still feel unsettlingly familiar today.

For Montgomery, the project checked “so many” boxes to end his acting pause. “Obviously, the fact that it’s topical and a huge conversation in the social and political zeitgeist right now," he explains. "Second was Gus Van Sant. And then thirdly, having a character that pushes me.”

The film pulls audiences in under one set of expectations before quietly undermining them. In that sense, Dead Man’s Wire feels like a fitting reentry point for Montgomery — a project that asks for patience, curiosity and a willingness to sit in discomfort, qualities he’d spent years rediscovering away from Hollywood.

That challenge extended beyond the performance itself. Working opposite Skarsgård, Montgomery found himself tested in unexpected ways — not just onscreen, but off it too.

“I get really into my head when I'm working,” he admits. “I'm super-intense when I'm on set, and I don't socialize. I never socialize ever.” Skarsgård, he says, didn’t let him retreat so easily. “He was really good at being like, ‘Hey, come out to dinner. Let’s have a bite to eat.’ And I’d be like, ‘No, I need to prep and do my thing.’”

What Skarsgård understood — and insisted on — was that accessibility was part of the work. “He was like, ‘Dude, this is part of it. I can’t act with [someone] that’s not accessible,’” Montgomery recalls. “That was a big learning for me.”

Even as the work excites him again, Montgomery remains certain about the decision that shaped it.

“I decided to step away from the industry for quite some time, and it was worth it in every single way for myself,” he says.

Time away in Perth forced him to confront how much of himself he poured into each role, and how vulnerable that left him. He went home to reflect — “about myself, my process, what I want in life [and] my personal life,” he says. (Montgomery got engaged in 2023.)

“So many things that inform your work as an actor because the vocation that I’ve chosen is one where you bring yourself to it,” he explains, “and that can be very intimidating. It can be very exposing.”

After Stranger Things thrust him into global visibility, he felt something shift. Stepping back gave him space to understand what he wanted — and what he didn’t. “I didn’t want to just be kind of doing anything and everything, or something for money or something for this, that or the other,” he says. “I wanted to be spending time working with directors and characters that I want to be investing in.”

That’s not to say he looks back on Stranger Things with regret. (After being a regular in the second and third seasons, he appeared in two episodes of Season 4.) Montgomery calls the series an “extremely formative period of time,” adding that he was “extremely lucky to have experienced it” — and that he’s excited to see what its creators, the Duffer brothers, do next.

Dead Man’s Wire is one of several carefully chosen projects Montgomery has taken on recently. But if there’s one thing he’s clear about moving forward, it’s this: Fame is “definitely not part of why I’m doing what I’m doing at all.”

He adds: “I put all of myself into everything I do. So choosing where to put that energy became really important.”

That intention has already reshaped what he’s building next.

“I’ve spent the last 10 years working toward directing my first film,” he says. “We wrapped [last month].” Editing is already underway, and for Montgomery, the experience affirmed the unique path he’s taken.

“I really look at every job in the industry as if it’s my last,” he says. “I’m happy to retire. Every job I put everything into — and if that’s the last experience that I have, that’s it.”