Buddy Duress, who came from the streets to find stardom, dies at 38

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 film. careers of filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie, died in November at his home in Astoria, Queens. He was 38.

The death, which was not announced until late February, was the result of cardiac arrest caused by a “drug cocktail” including heroin, said his brother, Christopher Stathis.

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. In early December, he said, he told her and several other people, but no one close to Mr. Duress made an announcement. Mr. Duress had often been out of the public eye in recent years and was frequently in prison.

At the height of his career, in the mid-2010s, directors made trips to Rikers Island to visit and audition Mr. Duress. He performed alongside Michael Cera and Robert Pattinson, and critics said he stole scenes. At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, he walked the red carpet of the Grand Théâtre Lumière, the main theater, to a standing ovation and then thrust his face in front of a French TV camera. shout“What is it, queens?”

He was out of control and thrill-seeking, qualities that gave his performances authenticity on set, but which also led him to squander opportunities. But each time he said that he would finally change: he was ready to devote himself to acting.

In August 2013, having a stage name, Buddy Duress, and a future film career had never occurred to him. He was Michael Stathis, a convict on the run. He had just spent about three months at Rikers for heroin possession and then dropped out of a court-ordered rehabilitation program.

Instead, he met 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.

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 indie film credits. The two had become friends and Mr. Safdie paid her to write the story of her life, which he wanted to turn into his next film, 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 photographing and selling heroin, how he lived with his mind.

“He’s kind of a street legend, kind of a criminal,” Mr. Safdie told Filmmaker magazine in 2015. “I had heard countless stories about him before I met him, and when I finally met him, I was hooked.”

The film ‘Heaven Knows What’ took shape as a story based on Mrs. Holmes’ experiences with heartbreak and self-destruction. Mr. Stathis was not intended to play a major role, but he worked his way into more and more parts of the production. He and Mr. Safdie developed a friendly rapport, hugging each other on set. Crew members hung out with Mr. Stathis and Mrs. Holmes at a McDonald’s and adopted the habit of pouring E&J VSOP brandy into cups of Coca-Cola. When Mr. Stathis and Ms. Holmes got into an argument about 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 names with Ms. Holmes and Mr. Safdie. They chose Buddy Duress, inspired in part by Mr. Stathis’ dog, Buddy.

About a day after filming ended, police caught up with Mr. Stathis. He was sent back to Rikers. But like him remembered to The New York Post in 2017, he was delighted.

“I made the wrong decision to go on the run, but if I had started the program I probably would have gotten out, relapsed and done the same thing again,” he said, referring to rehab and inserting an expletive. That “wrong decision,” he continued, “resulted in the most positive thing I have ever done.”

‘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 small, beautiful classic of street theater’. In The New Yorker, Richard Brody continued: calling it was a “radical act of sympathy” that “provoked emotions that you previously thought were impossible to feel.”

Mr. Safdie had paid Ms. Holmes to keep a diary, and he asked Mr. Duress – now under his stage name – to do the same from prison, sending money by the page to Mr. Duress’s prison commissary account .

Upon 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 profession in a class with 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 rose to 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 turned to Mr. Duress’ prison diary. It became, Mr. Safdie told Fader magazine, ‘the core of inspiration’ for a film 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 beer together on Mr. Duress’s mother’s doorstep in Astoria.

Their project, ‘Good Time’, has amassed millions of dollars in funding. The Safdie brothers called it is “our first feature film.”

When it debuted in 2017, Mr. Duress the best reviews of his career. The Film Magazine wrote that his “strikingly rugged face and sharp Queens motor mouth give us a taste of the alternative world that exists beneath the polished surface of New York City.”

Speaking to Fader, Josh Safdie predicted that Mr. Duress could become “the Joe Pesci of our time.”

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 ten, his parents separated and he moved to New Jersey to live with his father, while Christopher stayed with his mother. Mike’s relationship with his father was physically abusive, and the memories of it left Mike bitter and despondent for the rest of his life, Christopher said. Around the age of fifteen, Mike moved back in with his mother and brother in Astoria.

He attended the Robert Louis Stevenson School on the Upper West Side and frequently got into trouble. His mother sent him to the Élan School in Maine, a reformed boarding school with extreme forms of discipline, including shouting sessions and boxing matches, which drew widespread criticism and led to the school’s closure in 2011. Speaking to Fader, Mr Duress recalled himself, “One day I freaked out, broke a piece of wood off the chair and broke it over this kid’s head.”

In his early 20s, he was living on the streets, selling heroin to support his habit and deception.

He and Mrs. Holmes became close after he offered her heroin and she proved her trustworthiness by immediately paying him back. In the winter, they kept each other warm while sleeping on the street and took turns shooting in the bathroom of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the Upper West Side.

At that time, Mr. Duress expressed elaborate scam ideas that his friends often laughed off as unrealistic, Ms. Holmes said in a telephone interview.

Then he got his big break.

In 2017 he has told The Post that he had changed his ways. “No more drugs, no more parties,” he said. “I’m not even going to steal a candy bar.” For a time, he used methadone, but not heroin, Christopher said.

But the promised period of discipline never came. The Post had another one in 2019 profile, under the headline “Buddy Duress should be a big star, but he can’t stay out of Rikers.” The newspaper reported that his mother went to the police to report him for stealing checks and forging her signature. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Duress said.

The same year, in a interview with The New Yorker, Josh Safdie no longer sounded optimistic about his friend’s future.

“He’s so talented,” Mr. Safdie said. “He did so 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 jail during the 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 slipped a note to a bank teller asking for money, fled from the police, fell from an elevated subway platform and landed handcuffed to a bed at Elmhurst Hospital, events that eerily mimicked the plot of “Good Time.”

Several officers dropped him. Christopher and Mrs Holmes said that in recent years Mr Duress could become combative 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 also survived by his parents.

Peter Verby, a criminal defense attorney who starred in “Good Time,” was one of Mr. Duress’s few movie friends who knew him as Michael Stathis. Mr. Verby kept an eye on his legal issues.

“I represent so many people with the kind of problems he had, and they always have excuses,” Mr Verby said. “Michael never did that.”

“It seems paradoxical to say that an admitted and convicted thief was honest, but he was honest. He was honest about who he was.”