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Stranger Things’ Dacre Montgomery Goes Undercover on Reddit, YouTube and Twitter | GQ

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An Australian actor slips past his own fandom’s radar to set the record straight, one reply at a time.

Dacre Montgomery spent the days after “Stranger Things” Season 3 dropped in July 2019 doing something most actors avoid entirely: reading the internet’s opinion of him and typing back. For GQ’s recurring series “Actually Me,” Montgomery went undercover across Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Quora, answering real fan questions and comments as himself, unfiltered by publicists or a press line. The result is less a promotional stop than a rapid-fire Q&A with the people who spent the summer arguing about Billy Hargrove.

• Montgomery used the GQ segment, filmed after the July 2019 premiere of “Stranger Things” Season 3, to respond directly to fan posts on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Quora.
• He corrected a persistent mispronunciation of his own name, confirming “Dacre” does not rhyme with “daiquiri.”
• Montgomery used the platform to discuss “DKMH,” his six-track beat-poetry audio project set to original music from international artists, which he spent ten months developing before its July 2019 release.

Correcting the Record on His Name

Few things travel faster online than a confidently wrong pronunciation, and Montgomery’s first name had become one of those small, stubborn fan myths. Multiple commenters across the threads he combed through had settled on “daiquiri” as a rhyme, and Montgomery used his moment in the segment to shut that down directly, addressing it the same way he’d address a stranger who’d been repeating a rumor for months. It’s the kind of correction that only works when the source shows up in person, which is exactly the appeal of GQ’s format — a similar tactic to how other stars have used unscripted moments to push back on public narratives, the way stars have handled unwanted questions from interviewers.

Billy Hargrove, Under Discussion

With Season 3 fresh off its July premiere, plenty of the questions Montgomery encountered centered on Billy Hargrove, the Hawkins lifeguard turned antagonist he’d just spent a season playing. Fans pushed him on what it took to inhabit a character built to be genuinely unlikable before the show complicates him, and Montgomery answered as someone who’d clearly thought through the role’s mechanics rather than just its shock value. He treated the character breakdown with the same directness he brought to the pronunciation correction — no deflection, no PR gloss.

Dacre is not pronounced like daiquiri.

DKMH: Ten Months in the Making

Away from Hawkins, Montgomery used the segment to talk about a project entirely his own: “DKMH,” a six-track audio compilation pairing his beat poetry with original music composed by artists from around the world. He’d been building it for ten months before its July 2019 launch, and the GQ appearance gave him a chance to explain the project directly to fans who’d stumbled onto it online without much context. It’s a side of Montgomery that sits closer to the creative instincts of musicians who’ve built projects outside their day job, the same instinct that’s driven other performers profiled for being nothing like their public image suggests.

Fitness Questions and Fan Commentary

Rounding out the exchange, Montgomery fielded the more routine curiosities fans always bring to actors who play physically demanding roles — questions about his training and conditioning — alongside general commentary about his online presence. He answered each in the same conversational register, treating the fitness questions with no more or less weight than the pronunciation correction or the podcast explainer, which is the format’s whole point: nothing gets a press-trained non-answer.

The segment wrapped without any teaser for a follow-up, but with “DKMH” freshly out and Season 3 still generating fan theories about Billy’s fate in Hawkins, Montgomery’s undercover run gave viewers a more direct answer sheet than any traditional interview would have.