Buddy Duress Is Dead, But the ‘Heaven Knows What’ Star Made Himself—and the Safdies—Impossible To Forget

Buddy Duress, an actor who appeared in a pair of indie films directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, has died at the age 38. Duress, who previously sold heroin while living on the streets of New York, was an unforgettable presence in Heaven Knows What and Good Time, the latter of which helped bring the Safdies to the mainstream.

Duress passed away in November 23, but his death wasn’t confirmed to the media until late February, when his brother Christopher Stathis revealed that Duress died in his home in Astoria, Queens. Stathis told the New York Times that Duress died from cardiac arrest due to a “drug cocktail” that included heroin. Born Michael Stathis in 1985, the Queens, New York native first met Josh Safdie in 2013. At that point, Duress had served three years in prison for heroin possession and was likely wanted by authorities for blowing off a court-mandated rehab program. He was living on the streets of New York when he befriended a 19-year-old Arielle Holmes, who was also unhoused and struggling with heroin addiction. It was through Holmes that Duress met the Safdies, who wanted to make a movie based on Holmes and asked her to write out her story.

That story became Heaven Knows What, in which Holmes plays a fictionalized version of herself named Harley alongside a cast mostly made up of people that Holmes knew from the street—including Duress, who plays Harley’s friend, Mike. Heaven Knows What follows the tumultuous day-to-day life of Harley, who panhandles for cash to get heroin, anxious to avoid the unforgiving sickness of withdrawal and upsetting the precarious dynamic with her boyfriend, Ilya, played by Caleb Landry Jones. Harley and Ilya’s codependent relationship is exacerbated and propelled by their shared addiction, and the film actually begins with the pair on the outs: Harley slept with someone else, and in a desperate bid for Ilya’s forgiveness, she commits an act of self-harm and is remanded to a psychiatric facility.

When Harley gets out, she spends time with a couple of drug dealers: Duress’ Mike, and Skully, played by cult rapper Necro. With his drawn face and nervy vibe, Duress—like Holmes—is impossible to divorce from his character. There’s a sense—maybe it’s an assumption or even a hope—that what Duress and Holmes are doing in Heaven Knows What is cathartic, a ritualistic retreading of a shared experience. We’re drawn to reality television for the heightened performance and contrivances featuring characters defined by recognizable tropes. But what the Safdies, Duress, and Holmes achieve in Heaven Knows What is a distinctively realistic portrait of life that reality television could never reverse-engineer. It’s also what makes the film so acutely uncomfortable to watch.

I often think about Heaven Knows What and this image from the film, of Harley curled up with Mike, asleep on a couch in a messy apartment. A transient moment of calm, briefly liberated in the liminal space between consciousness and nothingness.

I won’t go into detail about the end of the film in case you want to watch it, and you really should if you’re able to—Heaven Knows What is streaming for free on The Criterion Channel, Roku, and Kanopy (free with a public library card). But Duress is one of the last faces we see, in a fast food restaurant where Mike is telling some friends a revisionist story of a fight in which he was the victor. The real story, as we saw it earlier, ended with Mike wounded and frustrated. But this is his story as he chooses to tell it, and even though we know the truth, Duress is so disarming—his flaws so familiar and endearing—that you can’t help but accept it.

The stigmas around drug addiction and homelessness are often perpetuated by even the most well-meaning filmmakers. Episodes of the TV series Intervention, for instance, push a myopic narrative of addiction in which there is only one way to recover—through rehab, abstinence, and a 12-step program—and make melodrama of the individual traumas and circumstances that offer such fertile ground for substances to take root.

Part of what makes Heaven Knows What so profound is that it succeeds where other media about drug addiction often fails, effectively humanizing the characters—not just by treating them like people, but by casting real people to perform a version of their experience that is quietly observed. Through Duress and Holmes we bear witness to lives we often ignore; however unwittingly or willfully, this choice is ultimately to our detriment.

Buddy Duress is dead, but his performance in Heaven Knows What is a gift to all who choose to observe it.

(featured image: Radius-TWC)