R.I.P. Buddy Duress, actor from the Safdie brothers’ Good Time
The actor, whose experiences at Rikers Island helped inform his work, was 38
Actor Buddy Duress (born Michael C. Stathis), a frequent collaborator with the Safdie brothers who appeared in Heaven Knows What, Good Time, and Funny Pages, has died. Speaking with People, his brother Christopher Stathis revealed that Duress died of “cardiac arrest from a drug cocktail” in November. Duress was 38.
Duress had been open about his problems with drug addiction, explaining in an interview with Ssense in 2017 that he met Josh Safdie after spending a few months at infamous New York City prison Rikers Island on a drug charge. He took a deal that allowed him to avoid more jail time if he went through a drug rehabilitation program, but when the escort that was supposed to take him didn’t show up, he just left and spent the next 364 days sleeping in parks and using a fake ID to avoid the authorities. During this time, his friend Arielle Holmes told him that she was going to be in a movie—Heaven Knows What—and introduced him to co-director Josh Safdie.
Safdie asked Duress to be in the movie as well (Ssense says it was because of his “scammer confidence and warm-hearted power”), and he figured at the time that he probably would’ve never been an actor at all if he hadn’t skipped out on the court-ordered program. People says he did eventually get caught and was back in Rikers when the film premiered in 2014.
When he got out again, Josh and Benny Safdie reportedly asked Duress to write a journal about his experiences, which they used to inform their script for Good Time—their 2017 movie starring Robert Pattinson as a small-time crook trying to dodge the police in New York. Duress played Ray, another criminal who is out on parole and who briefly takes over the movie when he shows up.
Duress later had a cameo in the Safdie-produced Funny Pages, but as laid out by People, he still had his troubles with the police. He went back to Rikers in 2019 on charges of grand larceny, then again for threatening to burn his mother’s house down, then again “for charges of menacing and criminal possession of brass knuckles and a controlled substance.” That happened while he was filming director Cameron Van Hoy’s Flinch, with Van Hoy telling People that Duress was “pure electricity on screen” and that he “was a kind person who loved making films.” He’ll be seen in his final film, Mass State Lottery, later this year, with director Jay Karales saying he was a “once in a lifetime charismatic actor.”
Duress is survived by his mother and brother.