Buddy Duress, who went from streets to stardom; at 38
NEW YORK — Buddy Duress, a small-time heroin dealer living on the streets of the Upper West Side of Manhattan who became a sensation in the New York film scene as an actor and muse for the movies “Heaven Knows What” and “Good Time,” which launched the careers of filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, died in November at his home in Queens. He was 38.
The death, which was disclosed only in late February, was from cardiac arrest caused by a “drug cocktail” including heroin, his brother, Christopher Stathis, said.
Stathis said their mother, JoAnne Stathis, was seriously ill in November, so he withheld news of the death, hoping to inform her himself at an appropriate time. By early December, he said, he had told her and several other people, but nobody in Mr. Duress’s circle made an announcement. Mr. Duress had been out of the public eye and in jail frequently in recent years.
At the height of his career, in the mid-2010s, directors made trips to Rikers Island to visit and audition Mr. Duress. He acted alongside Michael Cera and Robert Pattinson, and critics said he stole scenes. At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, he strolled down the red carpet of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the main theater, to a standing ovation, then shoved his face in front of a French TV camera, shouting, “What’s up, Queens?”
He was ungovernable and thrill-seeking, traits that, on the set, gave his performances authenticity but that also led him to squander opportunities. Each time, though, he said he would change: He was ready to dedicate himself to acting.
In August 2013, having a stage name, Buddy Duress, and a future career in movies had never crossed his mind. He was Michael Stathis, a convict on the lam. He had just spent about three months at Rikers for heroin possession and then ditched a court-mandated inpatient rehab program.
Instead, he met up with Arielle
Holmes, a 19-year-old fellow addict whom he often slept with on church steps and in parks around Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Holmes had news. Months earlier, in a subway station, she had caught the eye of Josh Safdie, a young man with littleknown but impressive indie film credits. The two had become friends, and Safdie was paying her to write down the story of her life, which he intended to turn into his next movie, starring her and other people in her scene.
Many of Holmes’s friends were skeptical, but when Mr. Stathis met Safdie, he became enthusiastic. He told the filmmaker about his life — how he spent his time shooting and selling heroin, how he lived by his wits.
“He’s a street legend, kinda, a criminal,” Safdie told Filmmaker magazine in 2015. “I had heard tons of stories about him before I met him, and when I finally did, I was smitten.”
The movie, “Heaven Knows What,” took shape as a story based on Holmes’s experiences of heartbreak and self-destruction. Mr. Stathis was not supposed to have a big role, but he worked his way into more and more of the production. He and Safdie developed a jovial rapport, bear-hugging on the set. Crew members hung out with Mr. Stathis and Holmes at a McDonald’s, adopting their habit of pouring E&J VSOP brandy into cups of Coca-Cola. When Mr. Stathis and Holmes got into a fight over drugs, the crew told them to start over and argue in front of the camera. It became a dramatic scene in the movie.
Mr. Stathis also workshopped stage names with Holmes and Safdie. They settled on Buddy Duress, partly inspired by Stathis’s dog, Buddy.
About a day after filming ended, the police caught up with Mr. Stathis. He was sent back to Rikers.
But, as he told The New York Post in 2017, he was elated.
“I made the quote-unquote wrong decision of going on the run, but if I went into the program, I probably would have got out, relapsed and done the same all over again,” he said, referring to drug rehab and inserting an expletive. That “wrong decision,” he continued, “resulted in the most positive thing I’ve ever done.”
“Heaven Knows What” was released in 2014 to the sort of reviews that young artists can usually only daydream about.
In The New York Times, Nicolas Rapold labeled the movie “a small, beautiful classic of street theater.” In The New Yorker, Richard Brody went further, calling it a “radical act of sympathy” that provoked “emotions one might hitherto have thought impossible to feel.”
Safdie had paid Holmes to keep a diary, and he asked Mr. Duress — now going by his stage name — to do the same from prison, sending money per page into Mr. Duress’s prison commissary account.
On his release in March 2015, Mr. Duress landed a role in “Person to Person,” a 2017 film starring Cera and Tavi Gevinson and directed by Dustin Guy Defa. He studied his new occupation in a class with character actor Clark Middleton.
Pattinson, who gained fame as a heartthrob in the “Twilight” movie series, told the Safdies after “Heaven Knows What” that he wanted to work with them. Now Josh Safdie needed a new project. He turned to Mr. Duress’s prison journal. It became, Safdie told Fader magazine, “the kernel of inspiration” for a movie about characters on the run from the police.
Safdie cast Mr. Duress and Pattinson to act opposite each other. The three young men drank beers together on the stoop of Mr. Duress’s mother’s place in Queens.
Their project, “Good Time,” amassed millions of dollars in funding. The Safdie brothers called it “our first Movie-Movie.”
When it debuted in 2017, Mr. Duress got the best reviews of his career. The Film Magazine wrote that his “distinctively rugged face and sharp Queens motormouth gives us a taste of the alternative world existing under
New York City’s polished surface.”
Michael Constantine Stathis was born May 21, 1985, in New York. His mother worked at NBC, and his father, Tom, was a photographer and photo editor for the Associated Press. When Mike was about 10, his parents separated, and he moved to New Jersey to live with his father while Christopher remained with his mother. Mike Stathis’s relationship with his father was physically abusive, and memories of it made him bitter and despondent for the rest of his life, Christopher Stathis said. Around the age of 15, Mike Stathis moved back in with his mother and brother in Queens.
He attended the Robert Louis Stevenson School on the Upper West Side and got into trouble regularly. His mother sent him to the Élan School in Maine, a reformatory boarding institution with extreme forms of discipline.
By his early 20s, he was living on the street, selling heroin to support his habit and panhandling.
After critical acclaim for his movie roles, Mr. Duress said he had changed his ways. But the promised period of discipline never arrived. In 2019, the Post ran another profile, under the headline “Buddy Duress should be a huge star, but he can’t stay out of Rikers.” The paper reported that his mother had gone to the police to turn him in for stealing checks and forging her signature.
The same year, in an interview with The New Yorker, Josh Safdie no longer sounded optimistic about his friend’s future.
“He’s so talented,” Safdie said. “He was doing so well. And he just got sucked back into that world.”
Multiple agents dropped him. His brother and Holmes said that in recent years Mr. Duress could become belligerent when drunk, even to the point of violence. But, Christopher Stathis added, Mr. Duress never gave up on the idea of a comeback.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Duress is survived by his parents.