Interview: Dacre Montgomery on ‘Went Up the Hill’
Dacre Montgomery wasn’t sure what he wanted to do next.
Coming off of the massive success of Stranger Things, which marked his breakout role, and his turn as the Red Ranger in the beloved Power Rangers film revival, both released in 2017, Montgomery must have had his pick of projects to choose from. But aside from a minor role in Baz Luhrmann‘s Elvis biopic and an effortlessly charismatic turn opposite Geraldine Viswanathan in the charming rom-com The Broken Hearts Gallery, he practically went radio silent.
Montgomery, as it turns out, was looking for the right project that would remind him why he wanted to be part of the film industry in the first place. And as it turns out, that project was Went Up the Hill, a haunting, searing ghost story from New Zealand-based filmmaker Samuel Van Grinsven. The film follows Jack as he travels to remote New Zealand for the funeral of his estranged mother, Elizabeth. There, he meets her widow, Jill (Vicky Krieps), and over the nights that follow, Elizabeth’s spirit begins to possess them in turn. What starts as a search for closure soon unearths deeper wounds. Bound by grief and haunted by what remains, Jack and Jill must break free from Elizabeth’s grasp before she pushes them to the edge.
“I was on a plane, I read the script, and I reread the script,” Montgomery recalls. “I wrote a big letter to Samuel basically saying, ‘I’m flying somewhere, yada yada yada, and I am reading the script and I’m rereading the script and it’s just absolutely beautiful. I would love nothing more than to do this and to work with you and to play this character.’ I was instantly obsessed.”
That instant pull came before he’d even turned a page. What first reached him was the concept: a three-handed story told by only two actors, with Montgomery and Vicky Krieps playing the same third character, Elizabeth, Jack’s estranged mother and Jill’s abusive wife, in an unorthodox shared performance. “I’d never heard of that in film,” he says. “In theatre, definitely. But in film? No. And I jumped at that.”
Before the script, there was Van Grinsven’s visual deck, a creative blueprint for the film’s mood, palette, and tone that also served as inspiration for the performances as well. “It was amazing. I was so taken by it,” Montgomery says. “I’d taken a long time off, and it felt like this was the film I’d been waiting for in that time. This was the project. This was the character. This was the world I wanted to explore.”
That exploration began a full year before cameras rolled. Montgomery and Van Grinsven met virtually and in person to excavate Jack, and discover who he was and what he had been up to prior to the events of the film. We don’t get to see much of Jack’s (or Jill’s) lives outside of the events of the film. What we do know is that Jack was estranged from his mother and that he has a boyfriend (who we briefly hear in a phone call, voiced by Arlo Green). But Montgomery worked closely with Van Grinsven to determine what shaped Jack as a person and made him become the man he is today. “A lot of the developmental work I did was going away and writing poetry,” he says. “Sort of musings, ruminations about him — the time he was given up, where he landed, what his upbringing was like, what he felt he’d gained by leaving that world behind, and what he was curious about in terms of not having a maternal figure in his life.”
He arrived on set knowing exactly where Jack had come from and why he was now returning, not just on the page, but in Montgomery’s own life. “There were a lot of parallels with Dacre,” he admits. “I was returning to New Zealand — half of my family is from there — and I really wanted to explore my own grief and my own trauma. For both Vicky and I, there were personal connections, and that always makes a performance more impactful. You see an actor actually connecting with it in real time.”
That connection is more than evident in his performance. Montgomery delivers a layered, incredibly nuanced portrayal of a grieving young man mourning a mother that seemingly loved him but also abandoned him, a dichotomy that he can’t seem to make sense of. But as Elizabeth, however, he transforms into a cool, confident figure whose sole objective is to confuse Jill and continue to complicate her life even beyond the grieve. It’s a performance for the ages, one that showcases a whole new side of Montgomery that we’ve only seen hints of before.
In order to perfect their dual performances of Elizabeth, Montgomery and Krieps planned to rehearse for a week prior to filming. However, they ended up lasting merely a day and a half. “We both realised two things,” he says. “One — we didn’t want to over-rehearse and use up all that special energy. And two — we discovered we were going to play Elizabeth completely differently in some ways.”
They saw Went Up the Hill not as a supernatural tale, but as a story where two characters create a person to process their grief. Elizabeth, born between them, would exist without prosthetics, wigs, or vocal shifts, only subtle changes in energy and intent. “Because of that, we wanted to save it and discover what the other was doing in the handover of those scenes when we changed characters,” Montgomery explains. “In many ways, Elizabeth isn’t even Elizabeth — it’s Jack slash both. It was new ground, new space. No one’s really done that before.”
Shooting in near-chronological order deepened that discovery, each scene carrying the emotional weight of the last. By the time the film reached Toronto for its world premiere, Montgomery had been holding his breath for a year and a half. “That felt like the release,” he says. “I just cried the whole way through that screening.”
Now, Jack is quite literally part of him. “I have Jack’s tattoo down the side of my body — that’s the place it has,” he says. “It was a very formative period of time in this next chapter of my career, and in terms of experience. He’s also on my body. Some projects, you carry with you forever.”
Montgomery didn’t work for the entire year and a half between wrapping and TIFF. “There’s no way I could’ve play another character like that until I saw it first with an audience,” he says. Now, as the film is gearing up for its theatrical release, Montgomery is ready to move on. He stars alongside Bill Skarsgård, Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la in Gus Van Sant‘s latest film Dead Man’s Wire, premiering at the Venice Film Festival. He’s also set to make his directorial debut with The Engagement Party, set to begin filming in the coming months.
Montgomery credits that sudden burst in inspiration to Went Up the Hill. “It changed me as a person and as an actor,” he says. “And I can’t wait to make more projects like that in the future.”
WENT UP THE HILL is now playing in theaters.