Dane DiLiegro’s hands are meaty like steaks. He could hold an entire deck of cards – aired – without anyone seeing them.
“They’re butcher hands,” offered Dario Cecchini, an eighth-generation butcher in Tuscany, where DiLiegro has deboned cattle nearly every summer since 2016. rings outside.
Lately, her hands are encased in rubber gloves, sometimes balled up into fists the size of honeydew melons, sometimes enhanced with 4-inch jackets that would make Barbra Streisand envious. DiLiegro soon became one of Hollywood’s top “creature actors.” Covered in form-fitting, foam and latex wraps, he appears on screen as ghouls, space aliens and anything the screenwriters could dream up. This is an inside job for which he is particularly suited.
DiLiegro, who already has credits including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, is now the lead, or rather featured, creature in the seventh installment of the Predator franchise. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (“10 Cloverfield Lane”) and starring Amber Midthunder as the human protagonist, “Predator” begins streaming on Hulu on August 5.
Like the monster in the original 1987 sci-fi action horror film, DiLiegro’s Predator is a writhing, heat-seeking alien planet with superhuman strength and the ability to disappear into its surroundings. “I shot the entire film with my head around this creature, essentially blind,” he said. “I had to look at my legs through two small holes in the neck for the predator to look forward. They put sticks on the ground so I knew where to go or run.”
Amber Midthunder and Dane DiLiegro as the Predator in “Prey.”
(David Bukach)
In one scene, DiLiegro’s fiberglass and foam latex paste was accidentally set on fire. All he could say was that the assistant director said, “I think Dane’s head is on fire!” he found out when he shouted. DiLiegro took it seriously. “It kind of felt like a monster bar mitzvah for me,” he recalled. “A rite of passage for all creature actors.”
DiLiegro, 34 is not the kind of actor who can be hired to play in the background of a stage: he cannot blend into a crowded frame. He stands 6 feet 9, making him one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and a man who dominates every scene. Since arriving in Los Angeles two years ago with no acting experience, the dapper, barefoot native of the Boston burbs has played otherworldly grotesques in half a dozen movies and TV shows.
DiLiegro follows in the stomping footsteps of immortals like 5-foot-11 Boris Karloff, the “Frankenstein” (1935) monster, and 5-foot-6 Haruo Nakajima, “Godzilla” (1954) and the cutest baby boomer of the ’11s. continuation. His personal pantheon of horrors includes the 2-foot-tall Kane Hodder — best known for his portrayal of supernatural serial killer Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th. One of DiLiegro’s most treasured childhood mementos is a plastic knife that Hodder signed for him at Spooky World in Foxboro, Massachusetts.
Professional creature acting is one of the most esoteric careers in show business. DiLiegro’s voice is rarely heard, and his face, covered in masks or prosthetic makeup, is never seen. “People in the production department often think they can stick a stunt in there and everything will be fine,” he says, skeptically. “But the creature actor is very actor.”
Despite the tough rubber suit, he must express the essence of a varmint through deep non-verbal interpretation, radiating a great sense of power while broadcasting pure emotion. “You tell your story with your shoulders, your posture, your gait, the way you move,” DiLiegro said. “In some ways it’s harder than talking.”
Creating the breadth of an actor’s monster persona—masked in layers of latex from the top of his head to the tip of his occasionally veiled feet—takes hours of prep work and requires no bathroom breaks. “You have to learn to live with anxiety,” DiLiegro said. “You’re stuck in suits that are hot and heavy and sweaty. You sit and stand in them for up to 12 hours. It is itchy and numbing and restrictive. If the heat, heaviness and unpleasantness do not accept you, claustrophobia is likely to occur.”
To support the weight of the 65-pound suit and 40-pound animatronic equipment, it must remain thin and strong. Slipping into the skin of a space invader required him to drop his body fat percentage from 18 to 8. “How did I do that? Diet, exercise, lots of walks and bikes. Restricted calorie intake. I stopped eating breakfast.”
Mild-mannered, DiLiegro has strong opinions on everything from the butchery to the brilliance of the Boston Red Sox. He is also a philosopher who expounds endlessly on the Zen of life broadcasting. “I find it a bit therapeutic, especially since my face is covered in silicone and plaster casts,” she said. “You just sit there and you’re completely enclosed and it’s warm and kind of meditative. Other people may be scared: the process involves a lot of breath control.
Dane DiLiegro introduced Prey at San Diego Comic-Con in July.
(Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney)
He took a serpentine path from Beantown to Tinseltown: a 3,000-mile journey through New Hampshire, Sardinia, Israel, Ostuni, Italy, Trieste, Siena, Verona and Forli, and a host of other cities too obscure to remember. It turned out to be a 12-year trek.
DiLiegro grew up in Newton, Mass., the younger son of a Nike account manager and a wedding invitation calligrapher. “As a child, I used to walk around my house on all fours like an animal,” he said. “I was always hungry and I would stuff my mouth with food as soon as possible. My mother used to say, “You eat like a wild animal.” Now he uses a knife and fork.
He grew up in Lexington. And it grew. And it grew. He only got serious about basketball when he was 15, and despite his height, he didn’t join his high school team until his junior year. “Being educated in public schools, I never paid much attention to sports,” he says. “And to be honest, I’ve never been that good against them.”
When the University of New Hampshire offered DiLiegro a hoops scholarship, he was 6-foot-7 and 235 pounds. Nicknamed Psycho D for his manic focus, he graduated as the all-time leading rebounder. He might have been first if he hadn’t served a three-game suspension as a senior for using a fake parking pass.
Passed in the 2011 NBA draft, he went to Europe to play professional ball. He signed one-year contracts with teams in Italy (his paternal grandparents were from Gaeta and Canosa di Puglia) and Israel (his mother is Jewish). “I was a rebounder, defender and screen maker,” he said. “I was a blue-collar guy who did the dirty work, shut up and accepted that his job was to make the stars look good. It was very useful to bring the mentality of that athlete to acting.”
When not in court, he learned to speak fluent Italian and produced a web series called Adventure Monday. “I would explore the Italian countryside, find interesting restaurants and interview chefs,” DiLiegro said. “The idea was to create content so I could eventually host a culinary travel TV show.”
The 2016 installment of Adventure Monday is about Antica Macelleria Cecchini, a 246-year-old butcher shop in the Panzano hills of Chianti. Owner Dario Cecchini fell in love with DiLiegro’s hands and invited the baller to stay with him during the offseason. By day, DiLiegro deboned cattle on the chopping block at Cecchini’s commercial facility. At night, he waited tables at Cecchini’s steakhouse. “In my family, butchering was kind of a tradition,” DiLiegro said. “My mother’s father, Al Moll, once owned a kosher meat market outside of Boston.”
In the summer of 2019, while training in Lexington for the upcoming Italian season, DiLiegro received a call from a casting agent who wanted him to play a stand-up in the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Boy. The next day, DiLiegro went to the set in Boston.
During a break in the action, the film’s stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara told DiLiegro that he had all the capabilities of a live actor. He noted that there are only a few performers in Hollywood with DiLiegro’s build, agility and athleticism, and that he received almost all monster parts. “Chris warned me that the job is cramped, unpleasant, and you can’t go to the bathroom and have trouble moving around,” DiLiegro said, “but you get paid a SAG rate and you get to be in movies.”
The following week, DiLiegro flew to LA to do the cooking show, look at apartments and check out a few special effects shops. Her break came a week later when she heard about a Netflix show called Sweet Home that was about to be filmed in Korea. He landed a gig as a stunt double for a live actor who was hired to inhabit a bodybuilding mutant named Muscle Monster. DiLiegro stepped in when the actor quit.
Dane DiLiegro as Predator in Predator.
(20th Century Studios)
The role led to a turn as Halo’s Master Chief in Xbox commercials, a walker in The Walking Dead, Ba’al the fertility demon in the FX anthology American Horror Story, and Blink-182 frontman Tom Delonge’s upcoming Bigfoot. California Wolves” and the forest tribe Dragio in the competition series “The Quest” on Disney+.
With Predator, he takes on the role of arguably the most iconic creature ever. “I love being these monsters and creatures,” DiLiegro said. “When I get into character, I truly believe that I am no longer human and that I am invincible. It’s an indescribable feeling.”
At some point, however, DiLiegro strives to shed his second skin, play a member of his own species, and transcend the world of comic book geekdom. “No, I don’t want to play Hamlet,” he said. A break. “On the other hand, James Bond . . .”