Buddy Duress, a small-time heroin dealer living on the streets of the Upper West Side 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 helped launch the careers of the filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, died in November at his home in Astoria, 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.
Mr. Stathis said their mother, Jo-Anne 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 and shouted, “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 finally 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.
Ms. Holmes had news. Months earlier, in a Midtown subway station, she had caught the eye of Josh Safdie, a young man with little-known but impressive indie film credits. The two had become friends, and Mr. 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 Ms. Holmes’s friends were skeptical, but when Mr. Stathis met Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Ms. 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 Mr. Safdie developed a jovial rapport, bear-hugging each other on set. Crew members hung out with Mr. Stathis and Ms. Holmes at a McDonald’s, adopting their habit of pouring E&J V.S.O.P. brandy into cups of Coca-Cola. When Mr. Stathis and Ms. 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 Ms. Holmes and Mr. Safdie. They settled on Buddy Duress, partly inspired by Mr. 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 recalled to 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.”
Mr. Safdie had paid Ms. 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. The two young men talked practically every day.
On his release in March 2015, Mr. Duress landed a role in “Person to Person,” a 2017 film starring Mr. Cera and Tavi Gevinson and directed by Dustin Guy Defa. He studied his new occupation in a class with the character actor Clark Middleton.
Most people he met now thought of him as Buddy Duress; many did not know his birth name.
Mr. 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, Mr. Safdie told Fader magazine, “the kernel of inspiration” for a movie about characters on the run from the police.
Mr. Safdie cast Mr. Duress and Mr. Pattinson to act opposite each other. The three young men drank beers together on the stoop of Mr. Duress’s mother’s place in Astoria.
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.” Fader said that despite “competing for space with Pattinson and his beautiful mug, Buddy and his unhinged motormouth manage to steal scene after scene.”
Speaking to Fader, Josh Safdie predicted that Mr. 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 remained with his mother. Mike’s relationship with his father was physically abusive, and memories of it made Mike bitter and despondent for the rest of his life, Christopher Stathis said. Around the age of 15, Mike moved back in with his mother and 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 institution with extreme forms of discipline, including shouting sessions and boxing matches, that attracted widespread criticism and that led to the school’s closing in 2011. Talking to Fader, Mr. Duress recalled, “One day I flipped out, broke a piece of wood off the chair and broke it over this kid’s head.”
By his early 20s, he was living on the street, selling heroin to support his habit and panhandling.
He and Ms. Holmes became close after he fronted her heroin and she proved herself trustworthy by paying him back promptly. In the winter, they kept each other warm sleeping on the street and took turns shooting up in the bathroom of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the Upper West Side.
At the time, Mr. Duress’s plans for the future consisted of elaborate ideas for con jobs that his friends tended to laugh off as unrealistic, Ms. Holmes said in a phone interview.
Then he got his big break.
In 2017, he told The Post that he had changed his ways. “No more drugs, no more partying,” he said. “I won’t even steal a candy bar.” For a while, he was using methadone but not heroin, Christopher said.
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. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Duress was quoted as saying.
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,” Mr. Safdie said. “He was doing so well. And he just got sucked back into that world.”
Christopher Stathis said that his brother would probably have appeared in “Uncut Gems,” the Safdie brothers’ nationwide 2019 hit starring Adam Sandler, but that he was in jail during the filming. The Post reported that incarceration had also deprived Mr. Duress of the chance to audition for “The King of Staten Island” (2020), a comedy starring Pete Davidson and directed by Judd Apatow.
In November 2019, Mr. Duress slipped a note to a bank teller asking for money, fled from the police, fell from an elevated subway platform and wound up handcuffed to a bed in Elmhurst Hospital, events that uncannily mimicked the plot of “Good Time.”
Multiple agents dropped him. Christopher and Ms. Holmes said that in recent years Mr. Duress could become belligerent when drunk, even to the point of violence. But, Christopher added, Mr. Duress never gave up on the idea of a comeback.
In addition to his brother, Mr. Duress is survived by his parents.
Peter Verby, a criminal defense lawyer who acted in “Good Time,” was one of Mr. Duress’s few friends from a movie to know him as Michael Stathis. Mr. Verby kept an eye on his legal issues.
“I represent so many people with the kinds of problems he had, and they always have excuses,” Mr. 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.”
