Dacre Montgomery reflects on dealing with grief while filming 'Went Up the Hill'

Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery processed his own grief threw the journey of his character Jack in Went Up the Hill.

The film follows Jack, who returns to New Zealand (where Dacre spent part of his childhood) when his mother dies. Jack and his mother’s widow, Jill, then process their grief as she haunts them from the grave.

"There's a lot of parallels to [myself in this film]. And really for me, I have a lot in common with Jack, and I felt like I was returning to New Zealand as Dacre to explore my past history and trauma through that," the actor told People.

"And being in New Zealand, shooting the film made it much easier to do that because I'm here in the landscape around where I spent a lot of my Christmases growing up, and I really wanted to use it as a sort of form of therapy or catharsis to explore my own grief," he added.

The project hit home with Dacre, who spoke in his real accent onscreen for the first time in his career. He noted that his grief wasn’t about losing someone but the loss of "innocence" and felt more "vulnerable" than he normally does on set.

"I'd never had a character with my own accent, which felt really weird. I feel like when I play a character that's not in my own accent, it's a bit of a mask. And with this, it was almost like I was forced to take another mask off and kind of show more of myself," he explained.

Dacre Montgomery’s Went Up The Hill will hit theaters on October 9.