Dane DiLiegro wasn’t told he’d be playing one of the most legendary monsters in film history.
Instead, he was contacted on Instagram by special effects artist Alec Gillis “to be the reference guy for a design pitch on a project that they were working on in Canada.” That project was Prey, and DiLiegro is the latest human to play the Predator, the giant, ferocious space alien that has been scaring moviegoers since 1987. Unfortunately, he skipped the “long, arduous story” of how he went from Instagram pitch to pitching his legacy in cinema, but he did tell Screen Rant some of the details—and how grateful he is for the experience:
“Alec [Gillis] DM’d me on Instagram in January of 2021 to be the reference guy for a design pitch on a project that they were working on in Canada. I will cut a lot of stuff out of this long, arduous story, but fast-forward to now, I turned out to be the main antagonist of said project and it’s been an incredible experience. And humbling for me, too, just as Alec said, to be included on this project. Here I am talking to you and with [puppeteers] Tom [Woodruff Jr.] and Alec, to be able to put our story out there, which we appreciate, because it’s great. It’s very easy to highlight focus on the main faces of the show, but it’s also important to highlight the people behind the scenes and the people under the rubber as well.”
At 6-foot-9, DiLiegro is a basketball-player-turned-monster-actor. He appeared in projects like Sweet Home, The Walking Dead, and American Horror Stories before landing his career-making role in Prey, which you can watch today on Hulu or your respective regional streaming platform.