Dacre Montgomery drops bombshell about disappearing at peak fame

Dacre Montgomery, famous for his breakout role in Stranger Things, has revealed why he stepped back from acting.

While conversing with PEOPLE magazine, the 30-year-old Australian actor admitted his portrayal of Billy Hargrove on the blockbuster Netflix series earned him wide acclaim and many different opportunities, but it also put him in a direction that was completely misaligned with his artistic pursuits.

Articulating his thoughts, Montgomery said, “I think with Stranger Things — as any big show on Netflix — it's kind of like you lose your anonymity overnight. And it was amazing and overwhelming and a combination of many things, and I felt really lucky and really fortunate to have that opportunity.”

He added, “But I think for me, I grew up really wanting to work with all tour directors on arthouse films and really explore how far I can push myself in terms of character development and really, really fall in love with stories.”

“And when Stranger Things came out, I felt like … I was really being pushed in a commercial direction,” the Power Rangers star stated.

Montgomery went on to confess that this convinced him to “take time to step back” in order to reappraise the sort of characters he wanted to depict, the filmmakers he was willing to collaborate with, and the variety of films he aimed to act in.

The Elvis actor also had to wait for the right “phone call” with a role he hankered after, explaining, “That sort of stuff takes time to kind of reverse engineer a career that's going one way into a different direction. It takes time, and I can't just generate a story, an amazing story [and] an amazing director in front of my eyes.”

Notably, it took him five years to put his career in the direction he always dreamt of while stepping into the entertainment world and now he claims to be on firmer ground.

“Now I kind of feel like I'm in a really, really good space with a couple of great movies coming up that fit the bill… in terms of where I wanted to be,” Dacre Montgomery noted.