“When I see Dan Stevens I kinda expect something weird is going to happen,” reads a YouTube comment on one of the actor’s interviews. It was written six years ago, roughly halfway into the decade-plus Stevens has spent diversifying his career since leaving Downton Abbey in one of TV’s most wrenching onscreen deaths. Given the year he’s having—first playing a monster veterinarian in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, then a corrupt cop turned vampire in Abigail, and now a sadistic German scientist in the newly released psychological thriller Cuckoo—it’s evident the actor has embraced the off-kilter.
“I mean, I love it. I think weird is usually where the good stuff is,” Stevens tells Vanity Fair on a recent Zoom from New York City, where he’s filming season three of AMC anthology series The Terror. “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. And generally speaking, the weirdo filmmakers out there who want to lean into that are usually my people.”
Some variation of “weird”—The New York Times recently opted for “kooky” and “funcomfortable”—is the only term that can encompass Stevens’s vast range of projects. The British actor has sung his way through splashy musicals (Disney’s live-action Beauty & the Beast; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga), embodied real-life figures (Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas; Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean in Watergate drama Gaslit), and gone to the dark side many times in between (superhero series Legion; The Guest). “The freedom of exploration that I experienced after Downton definitely helped to unlock something as a performer,” says Stevens. “It’s been a steady, progressive evolution over the last 12 years or whatever since I left that show.”
Of course, his three seasons as aristocratic heartthrob Matthew Crawley introduced the actor to a global audience. But it was his decision to exit the show at the height of its popularity that kept their eyes trained on Stevens. “Prior to Downton, I hadn’t done anything set in the modern day. I did something that was set in the ’80s, which is still technically a period,” he recalls. “So, there was definitely a minute where I was turning down costume drama because I wanted to explore other avenues.” But the barrage of World War I dramas and other period projects that were marching toward him at the time “can’t have been that great,” he insists. “Otherwise, I would’ve probably done it.”
Like most young actors, Stevens spent his early years attempting to “squish myself into this box that I imagined that they were looking to fill.” But as his career progressed, he learned to ask himself: “What part of my personal toolbox would I use to unlock this character, rather than trying to shoehorn myself into something that isn’t really me? That’s something that I wish I’d known 20 years ago, because it might have unlocked something creatively a lot sooner.”
Stevens channeled that approach into Neon’s Cuckoo, in which his sinister Herr König recruits Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen to work at a foreboding resort in Germany’s Bavarian Alps. “I like it when you can just go to a filmmaker and say, ‘Look, here’s what I would do with it. If you want that, here it is,’” he says. But director Tilman Singer, whom Stevens compares to the Davids—Lynch and Cronenberg—welcomed Stevens’s “wickedly funny” approach to the role, as well as his fluency in German. (Stevens previously spoke the language as a robot loverboy in I’m Your Man, which was the country’s official selection for the 2022 Oscars.)
“Right up until the 11th hour, it was supposed to be John Malkovich in the role,” he says. “Then something came up and he couldn’t do it. So they were looking for an actor to replace him, and it was suggested that perhaps König didn’t need to be quite as old as they had thought. I read it and immediately thought, This doesn’t need to be a guy in his 60s. A guy of any age could be keeping this project, that sort of mysterious legacy alive.”
König’s charm masks a morbid fascination with replicating an endangered species. Stevens’s creepy embodiment of the character, accentuated by an unsettling habit of playing the flute, elicited uncomfortable giggles in my screening. “I’m a big fan of that kind of laughter in a film like this,” says Stevens. “Something is a bit off, and you do want to make the audience a little bit uncomfortable. There’s a mixture of charm and menace in that role.”