So how do you upstage Joe Keery’s Steve as the bad boy of “Stranger Things”? Well, Australian actor Dacre Montgomery managed to do just that in his outrageous audition tape to play the mulleted high school heavy Billy in the second season of Netflix’s hit.
The “Power Rangers” alum shared his tryout — which features shirtless dancing, G-strings and Duran Duran — with the good folks at GQ. And the results are mesmerizing.
“I just kind of wanted to make a bit of a splash with the Duffers, because I assumed they would be getting so many tapes,” Montgomery told GQ. “I had the audition details for about a day, and I did the whole thing in the first day because I was so overwhelmingly excited about it.”
He even went to the trouble of selecting two 1982 songs — Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come On Eileen” in the tape — that had already been released by the time the second season was set, in 1984.
The Duffer brothers, who created the ’80s-set sci-fi series, clearly were impressed. “I sent off the tape at 11 o’clock that night, Australian time,” he said. “And then in the morning we had a response.”
Watch the video above.