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Buddy Duress, a small-time heroin dealer living on the streets of the Upper West Side who became a sensation on the New York film scene as an actor and muse for the films “Heaven Knows What” and “Good Time” , which launched the careers of filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, died in November at his home in Astoria, Queens. He was 38 years old.
The death, which was not revealed until late February, was due to cardiac arrest caused by a “drug cocktail” that included heroin, said his brother, Christopher Stathis.
Stathis said his mother, Jo-Anne Stathis, was seriously ill in November, so he hid news of the death, hoping to inform her himself at the appropriate time. In early December, he said, he had told her and others, but no one in Duress’s circle made an announcement. Duress had been out of public view and imprisoned frequently in recent years.
At the height of his career, in the mid-2010s, directors traveled to Rikers Island to visit and audition Mr. Duress. He starred alongside Michael Cera and Robert Pattinson, and critics said he stole scenes. At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, he walked the red carpet at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the main theater, to a standing ovation and then shoved his face in front of a French television camera. Screams“What’s up, queens?”
He was unruly and thrill-seeking, traits that, on set, gave authenticity to his performances but also led him to waste opportunities. However, he each time said that he would eventually change: he was ready to devote himself to acting.
In August 2013, having a stage name, Buddy Duress, and a future career in film had never crossed his mind. He was Michael Stathis, an escaped convict. He had just spent about three months in Rikers for heroin possession and then dropped out of a court-ordered inpatient rehab program.
Instead, he met up with Arielle Holmes, a 19-year-old fellow addict with whom he often slept on church steps and in parks on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Mrs. Holmes had news. Months earlier, in a Midtown subway station, she had caught the attention of Josh Safdie, a young man with little-known but impressive independent film credits. The two had become friends and Mr. Safdie was paying him to write the story of her life, which he intended to turn into her next film, starring her and others in her scene.
Many of Ms. Holmes’s friends were skeptical, but when Mr. Stathis met Mr. Safdie, he became excited. He told the filmmaker about his life: how he spent his time filming and selling heroin, how he lived off his wits.
“He’s a street legend, kind of a criminal,” Safdie told Filmmaker magazine in 2015. “I had heard tons of stories about him before I met him, and when I finally met him, I was in love.”
The film, “Heaven Knows What,” took shape as a story based on Mrs. Holmes’ experiences of heartbreak and self-destruction. Stathis wasn’t supposed to have a major role, but he worked his way more and more into the production. He and Safdie developed a jovial relationship, hugging each other on set. Team members hung out with Mr. Stathis and Ms. Holmes at a McDonald’s, taking up their habit of pouring E&J VSOP brandy into Coca-Cola glasses. When Stathis and Holmes got into a fight over drugs, the crew told them to start over and argue on camera. It became a dramatic scene in the movie.
Mr. Stathis also worked on stage naming workshops with Ms. Holmes and Mr. Safdie. They decided on Buddy Duress, inspired in part by Mr. Stathis’s dog, Buddy.
About a day after filming wrapped, the police caught up with Mr. Stathis. They sent him back to Rikers. But, like him remembered According to The New York Post in 2017, he was elated.
“I made the quote-unquote wrong decision to run away, but if I had gotten into the program, I probably would have gotten out, relapsed, and done the same thing again,” he said, referring to drug rehab and inserting an expletive. That “wrong decision,” he continued, “resulted in the most positive thing I have ever done in my life.”
“Heaven Knows What” was released in 2014 to the kind of reviews that young artists can usually only daydream about.
In The New York Times, Nicolas Rapold called the film “a beautiful little classic of street theater.” In The New Yorker, Richard Brody went further: vocation It was a “radical act of sympathy” that provoked “emotions that until now would have been considered impossible to feel.”
Safdie had paid Holmes to keep a diary and asked Duress (now using his stage name) to do the same from prison, sending money per page to Duress’s prison commissary account.
Upon his release in March 2015, Duress landed a role in “Person to Person,” a 2017 film starring Cera and Tavi Gevinson and directed by Dustin Guy Defa. She studied her new occupation in a class with character actor Clark Middleton.
Most people he knew now considered him Buddy Duress; many did not know his birth name.
Pattinson, who gained fame as a heartthrob in the “Twilight” film series, told the Safdies after “Heaven Knows What” that he wanted to work with them. Now Josh Safdie needed a new project. He searched for Mr. Duress’s prison diary. He converted, Mr. Safdie said Fader Magazine, “the core of inspiration” for a film about characters fleeing the police.
Safdie chose Duress and Pattinson to act opposite each other. The three young men drank beers together in the driveway of Mr. Duress’s mother’s house in Astoria.
His project, “Good Time,” racked up millions of dollars in funding. The Safdie brothers called It is “our first Movie-Film.”
When it debuted in 2017, Mr. Duress earned the best reviews of his career. The film magazine wrote that his “distinctively rugged face and sharp Queens motor mouth give us a glimpse of the alternative world that exists beneath the polished surface of New York City.”
Speaking to Fader, Josh Safdie predicted that Duress could become “the Joe Pesci of our times.”
Michael Constantine Stathis was born on 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 stayed with his mother. Mike’s relationship with her father was physically abusive, and memories of her left Mike feeling bitter and despondent for the rest of his life, Christopher said. Around age 15, Mike returned to live with his mother and his brother in Astoria.
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 school with extreme forms of discipline, including shouting sessions and boxing matches, which attracted widespread criticism and led to the school’s closure in 2011. Speaking to Fader, Mr. Duress recalled “One day I went crazy, broke a piece of wood from the chair and smashed it over this kid’s head.”
When he was in his early 20s, he lived on the streets, sold heroin to support his addiction, and panhandled.
He and Mrs. Holmes became close after he confronted her about his heroine and she proved trustworthy by quickly returning his money. In the winter, they kept each other warm by sleeping on the street and took turns shooting each other in the bathroom of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the Upper West Side.
At the time, Duress’ plans for the future consisted of elaborate scam ideas that his friends tended to laugh at as unrealistic, Holmes said in a telephone interview.
Then he got his big chance.
In 2017, he said The Post that had changed its habits. “No more drugs, no more parties,” she said. “I won’t even steal a chocolate bar.” For a time he used methadone but not heroin, Christopher said.
But the promised period of discipline never came. In 2019, The Post published another profile, under the title “Buddy Duress should be a big star, but he can’t stay out of Rikers.” The newspaper reported that his mother had gone to the police to report him for stealing checks and forging his signature. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Duress said.
The same year, in a interview In The New Yorker, Josh Safdie no longer seemed optimistic about his friend’s future.
“He’s very talented,” Safdie said. “He was doing very well. And he just got sucked back into that world.”
Christopher Stathis said his brother likely would have appeared in “Uncut Gems,” the Safdie brothers’ 2019 national hit starring Adam Sandler, but was in prison during filming. The Post reported that the incarceration had also deprived Mr. Duress of the opportunity to audition for “The King of Staten Island” (2020), a comedy starring Pete Davidson and directed by Judd Apatow.
In November 2019, Mr. Duress He slipped a note to a bank teller asking for money, fled from the police, fell from an elevated subway platform and ended up handcuffed to a bed at Elmhurst Hospital, events that uncannily mimicked the plot of “Good Time.”
Several agents dropped him. Christopher and Ms. Holmes said that in recent years Mr. Duress could become belligerent when he was drunk, even to the point of violence. But, Christopher added, Mr. Duress never gave up the idea of returning.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Duress is survived by his parents.
Peter Verby, a criminal defense lawyer who starred in “Good Time,” was one of Mr. Duress’s few movie friends who knew him as Michael Stathis. Mr. Verby was attentive to his legal problems.
“I represent a lot of people with the kind of problems he had, and they always have excuses,” Verby said. “Michael never did.”
“It seems paradoxical to say that an admitted and convicted thief was honest, but he was honest. He was honest about who he was.”