How Dan Stevens became everyone’s favourite weirdo character actor: “I love it”
In the last decade, Dan Stevens has played so many bizarrely weird and wonderful characters that it’s become almost impossible to imagine the fascinating actor portraying, you know, a regular guy.
Ever since 2014’s The Guest, which cast him as a handsome yet sinister war veteran who turned out to be the psychopathic result of a military science experiment, Stevens has seemingly done everything possible to erase people’s memory of the three seasons he spent on Downton Abbey at the start of his career. To his credit, Stevens has never indicated that he is embarrassed by his stint on Julian Fellowes’ ludicrously popular period drama, but he has also made it perfectly clear that it was never really his bag, baby (to borrow a phrase from a certain International Man of Mystery).
“I’m never looking to ignore it or deny it,” Stevens told Vanity Fair in 2024 when asked about his time. “I’m very, very grateful to it for what it did at the time, but I’m also equally grateful for everything that’s happened since. So, it’s part of a much larger tapestry these days.”
Indeed, this larger tapestry has included everything from horror movies (Abigail, Cuckoo), blockbusters (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Beauty & the Beast), comedy (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga), animation (The Sea Beast, Solar Opposites), David Lynchian television (Legion), and whatever his insane, bleached blonde, preposterously accented turn in Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities can be labelled as. Whatever you want to call it, though, the ‘Alo Glo Man’ was the twisted work of a man who loves nothing more than playing absolute weirdos, every chance he gets.
The real reason for choosing eccentric, oddball characters is a simple one: he’s a little offbeat and eccentric himself. “I mean, I love it,” he chuckled. “I think weird is usually where the good stuff is. That was always the goal, to play lots of different kinds of roles. How weird things have gotten is partly just me growing into myself, learning about my own tastes.”
It allows him to be able to understand very quickly if he will be able to work well with the story at hand. Despite his proclivities, Stevens is still incredibly grateful for his role in Downton Abbey. In fact, he often wishes these off-the-beaten-path opportunities had come to him much earlier, because then he could have avoided many years of trying to mould himself “into this box that I imagined that they were looking to fill.”
In essence, instead of trying to tamp down his natural impulses to deliver the conventional performances he felt people wanted and expected, Stevens would have realised much earlier that embracing his own peculiar sensibilities was a much better bet. There was no sense in him trying to be something he wasn’t; not when Hollywood was so receptive to what he was. “That’s something that I wish I’d known 20 years ago, because it might have unlocked something creatively a lot sooner,” he admitted.
So, how did Stevens become everyone’s favourite weirdo character actor? He simply became the actor he’d always wanted to be, and after a while, people started to take notice. Nowadays, if cinephiles see his name in the cast list, they know they’re in for something special – or, at the very least, especially strange. And sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered.
