Dan Stevens Left ‘Downton Abbey’ to Become Horror’s Best Creepy Leading Man

In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Abigail, the first of Dan Stevens’ 2024 horror movie appearances, the erstwhile Downton Abbey cast member has fun. He even says so on screen! “Where’s the fun in that?” he purrs to Melissa Barrera’s blood-soaked and bruised protagonist when she wonders why he won’t straight-up kill her. Not that the meta-confession is necessary, of course; Stevens’ tough affect and wry irritability plainly highlight his enjoyment in his role.

Stevens makes no such disclosure in Tilman Singer’s savage sophomore feature Cuckoo, but just as in Abigail, his performance handily expresses the raw delight he takes in the work. Abigail casts Stevens as Frank, an ex-cop and inveterate prick trapped in a mansion with a quintet of thieves designated as “dinner” for the centuries-old ballerina vampire who lives there; in Cuckoo, he plays Herr König, part-time operator of a resort in the German Alps, full-time “preservationist” to creatures with what may generously be described as “unorthodox” breeding habits.

For as wildly different as these characters are, they’re of a piece with one another in the context of Stevens’ filmography. After his 2012 departure from Downton Abbey, Stevens veered away from the predictable post-project career path, much as his character on the series, Matthew Crawley, veered his car into a ditch. He started taking parts in grittier genre films, like Scott Frank’s A Walk Among the Tombstones, where he co-starred with Liam Neeson in the midst of his late-stage action star pivot; more importantly he played the antagonist in Adam Wingard’s The Guest, essentially Captain America’s sociopathic cousin.

The Guest’s endurance in genre cinema’s 2010s-era canon is arguably the key to Stevens’ ascent to the upper tiers of contemporary horror. His association with Downton Abbey coded him as a period actor so quickly that roles in anything other than costume dramas represented seismic shifts for his career; what makes The Guest particularly effective as a tectonic event is the overlap in traits shared between David, Stevens’ character in the film, and Crawley, like their open-handed charm. David is well-mannered, peppering his speech with “yes sirs” and “yes ma’ams” designed to disarm anyone he interacts with—the better to preserve his identity. If his identity is compromised, David turns into an indiscriminate killing machine to cover his tracks. Until that happens, though, he’s just about the most polite fellow you’ve ever met.

Frank isn’t polite; König makes up for his coarseness. But Frank isn’t pretending to be anything any more than the rest of Abigail’s aliased characters are, either, while König very much plays the part of a kindly and unerringly astute resort owner. The true König, the side of him we see as Cuckoo’s plot delves further into biological madness, is more insidious, and frankly more dangerous because he thinks his purpose—the conservation of a monstrous species at the cost of human lives—is just.

Occasionally he’s convincing, too, as in his monologue to Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), the movie’s heroine, about the behavioral quirks of the cuckoo bird—a brood parasite—or in the movie’s climactic Mexican standoff between König and Henry (Jan Bluthardt, Singer’s leading man from Luz), a rogue lawman with an agenda of his own. Maybe an actor other than Stevens could successfully communicate the earnestness of König’s belief. But only Stevens could come close to persuading us to see his side, and empathize with his cause.

It took four years after The Guest for Stevens to go all-in on horror with Gareth Evans’ Apostle, a production in the fashion of The Wicker Man set on a remote island governed by pagan ideology. Two years later, he buttressed David Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, an early entry in horror’s then-budding “Airbnb gone wrong” subgenre, which seemed to solidify his adoption of horror as his new playground.

Stevens tried out a slew of different genres in the intervening years, like science fiction (Colossal, Kill Switch, I’m Your Man), and put his name on a handful of characters ranging from “hard to like” to “completely unlikable” (The Ticket, Permission), but there is something missing from even the best of these projects that is found in abundance in horror: mischief.

Stevens, at all times, comes off as someone who’s in on a joke and wants to see how long it takes for everyone else to figure out the punchline for themselves. That goes for König in Cuckoo and for Frank in Abigail, in spite of Frank’s comparative reduced dimension.

There’s nothing about Frank worth admiring or caring for in the same way as, say, Peter (Kevin Durand), Frank’s Quebecois cohort, whose hulking stature belies an irrepressible sweetness. All the same, Frank is a hoot to watch because Stevens looks for ways to tell that unwritten joke; it all goes back to “fun,” and the premium he places on it above the other tools in his actor’s kit. Stevens is handsome. He’s cool. He has immediate appeal to an audience’s joint senses, the kind that makes a character like Frank engaging and a character like König straightforwardly menacing.

There’s always the temptation to flip through the rolodex of monumentally influential classic actors when evaluating the style and sensibility of new ones; Stevens isn’t “new,” per se, but his status as a modern horror figure is, though it’s admittedly a long time coming. Is Stevens today’s Boris Karloff, or perhaps its Lon Chaney? A Christopher Lee type, or a Bela Lugosi type? Claude Rains? Peter Cushing? Robert Englund? John Carradine? Lionel Atwill?

If Stevens has any one-to-one antecedent, it’s probably Vincent Price, who, even at his most macabre and even when functioning on barbaric lizard-brain levels, unfailingly exudes inner warmth to clang against displays of cruel depravity; see The Abominable Dr Phibes, or Bloodbath at the House of Death, for starters. Price knew how to commit to material without making fun of it or showing the audience his hand and letting them in on his craft. He took every movie he worked on seriously, even the deeply unserious ones, eschewing any glimmer of self-awareness for a siloed focus on the work. He was a consummate professional.

That’s where the similarities between him and Stevens end, but they’re meaningful enough to provide a template for the sort of actor Stevens has, in the last decade, chosen to become: One whose charisma is underpinned by ever-present compassion, whether he’s playing nice guys, or total assholes, or amoral sickos driven by science.