“When I see Dan Stevens I kinda expect something weird is going to happen,” reads a YouTube comment on one of the actor’s interviews. It was written six years ago, roughly halfway into the decade-plus Stevens has spent diversifying his career since leaving Downton Abbey in one of TV’s most wrenching onscreen deaths. Given the year he’s having—first playing a monster veterinarian in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, then a corrupt cop turned vampire in Abigail, and now a sadistic German scientist in the newly released psychological thriller Cuckoo—it’s evident the actor has embraced the off-kilter.

“I mean, I love it. I think weird is usually where the good stuff is,” Stevens tells Vanity Fair on a recent Zoom from New York City, where he’s filming season three of AMC anthology series The Terror. “That was always the goal, to play lots of different kinds of roles. How weird things have gotten is partly just me growing into myself, learning about my own tastes. And generally speaking, the weirdo filmmakers out there who want to lean into that are usually my people.”

Some variation of “weird”—The New York Times recently opted for “kooky” and “funcomfortable”—is the only term that can encompass Stevens’s vast range of projects. The British actor has sung his way through splashy musicals (Disney’s live-action Beauty & the Beast; Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga), embodied real-life figures (Charles Dickens in The Man Who Invented Christmas; Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean in Watergate drama Gaslit), and gone to the dark side many times in between (superhero series Legion; The Guest). “The freedom of exploration that I experienced after Downton definitely helped to unlock something as a performer,” says Stevens. “It’s been a steady, progressive evolution over the last 12 years or whatever since I left that show.”

Of course, his three seasons as aristocratic heartthrob Matthew Crawley introduced the actor to a global audience. But it was his decision to exit the show at the height of its popularity that kept their eyes trained on Stevens. “Prior to Downton, I hadn’t done anything set in the modern day. I did something that was set in the ’80s, which is still technically a period,” he recalls. “So, there was definitely a minute where I was turning down costume drama because I wanted to explore other avenues.” But the barrage of World War I dramas and other period projects that were marching toward him at the time “can’t have been that great,” he insists. “Otherwise, I would’ve probably done it.”

Like most young actors, Stevens spent his early years attempting to “squish myself into this box that I imagined that they were looking to fill.” But as his career progressed, he learned to ask himself: “What part of my personal toolbox would I use to unlock this character, rather than trying to shoehorn myself into something that isn’t really me? That’s something that I wish I’d known 20 years ago, because it might have unlocked something creatively a lot sooner.”

Stevens channeled that approach into Neon’s Cuckoo, in which his sinister Herr König recruits Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen to work at a foreboding resort in Germany’s Bavarian Alps. “I like it when you can just go to a filmmaker and say, ‘Look, here’s what I would do with it. If you want that, here it is,’” he says. But director Tilman Singer, whom Stevens compares to the Davids—Lynch and Cronenberg—welcomed Stevens’s “wickedly funny” approach to the role, as well as his fluency in German. (Stevens previously spoke the language as a robot loverboy in I’m Your Man, which was the country’s official selection for the 2022 Oscars.)

“Right up until the 11th hour, it was supposed to be John Malkovich in the role,” he says. “Then something came up and he couldn’t do it. So they were looking for an actor to replace him, and it was suggested that perhaps König didn’t need to be quite as old as they had thought. I read it and immediately thought, This doesn’t need to be a guy in his 60s. A guy of any age could be keeping this project, that sort of mysterious legacy alive.”

König’s charm masks a morbid fascination with replicating an endangered species. Stevens’s creepy embodiment of the character, accentuated by an unsettling habit of playing the flute, elicited uncomfortable giggles in my screening. “I’m a big fan of that kind of laughter in a film like this,” says Stevens. “Something is a bit off, and you do want to make the audience a little bit uncomfortable. There’s a mixture of charm and menace in that role.”

By the time that König’s diabolical motives are fully revealed, any levity has been snuffed out. “Ultimately, that’s the horror of König for me. Yes, there’s the body-horror element,” says the actor. “But what’s really horrifying is somebody who just doggedly sticks to tradition at the expense of almost everybody. Those people who are going to stick to the old ways no matter what, and it’s like, ‘Really? We’re still doing that? Oh, that’s terrifying.’ I think that’s a theme worth poking at these days.”

After two seasons on HBO’s Euphoria, the film also marked Schafer’s first major foray into big-screen acting. “There’s nothing more exciting than doing your first movie, especially the lead, at the dawn of a very, very exciting career,” says Stevens of his costar. “There was a real energy there. She’s got a great attitude on and off set.”

The mission of Cuckoo was to ensure everybody making it had a good time, says Stevens, despite the demanding nature of many scenes involving himself and Schafer. “Her only experience prior to this was working on Euphoria, which is a very, very different experience, and by all accounts, not a terribly pleasant one,” says Stevens. “I think it was refreshing and delightful for her to realize that not every job needs to be like Euphoria. It was nice to be able to present that and to be a part of that. We can still shoot this incredibly fucked-up, difficult scene, but everybody’s still friends at the end of the day and nobody needs to have months of therapy afterwards.”

Another word of warning to Hunter Schafer: If you’re fortunate enough to star in a hit TV show, your penance is to be asked about it for as long as you both shall live. Five years after Fleabag bid its direct-to-camera farewell, Andrew Scott delivered a message to those still mourning his Hot Priest: “Go out and get some fresh air. It’s a great show, we all love it, but come on now, pull yourself together. Open the curtains and go outside.” Stevens can’t exactly offer a similar answer about Matthew Crawley’s Christmas Day demise, since the Downton machine drones on—a third film is slated for release next year.

“They’re still doing it,” he says, smiling. And Stevens has made peace with the fact that the series is forever entwined with his professional narrative. “I’m never looking to ignore it or deny it,” he says. “I’m very, very grateful to it for what it did at the time, but I’m also equally grateful for everything that’s happened since. So it’s part of a much larger tapestry these days.”

Stevens has learned some lessons in recalibrating his career, like the similarities between large tentpole films and smaller indies: “Working with [director] Adam Wingard on Godzilla was very much like working with Adam Wingard on The Guest, even though the budget was literally like a hundred times different.” The reception of a movie, he says, is also less important than how well it executes an initial concept. “Whether a film ends up being good or bad or successful or unsuccessful, if the finished product pretty much matches what the first conversation I had with that person was, I feel like that’s a great experience.”

And what about credits that could be filed away as missteps? Like when he voiced an animated Prince Philip at an utterly inconvenient time, or starred in an Amy Heckerling movie that, despite reuniting her with star Alicia Silverstone, flopped at the box office? Stevens appears amused to be reminded of such projects (both of which I’ve seen, by the way). “I’ve done stuff where millions and millions of people have seen it, but it might not be my favorite or your favorite thing,” he says simply. “I don’t expect all of my fans to love everything I do. And if you discover it in the great wide ocean of content that’s out there, then fantastic. That’s great that you enjoyed Vamps or The Prince or whatever.”

“But I try not to pin too many hopes on anything anymore, because it is such a lottery,” he continues. “Even something like Downton, when we made that first season, no one was expecting it to be what it became at all. We were just making another British period drama, and we thought it was good, but the way that it caught on—no one could have predicted. If I were to pin that kind of expectation on everything I did like, ‘Oh, why didn’t it become as big as Downton?’ That would drive me insane, and also just be a complete waste of energy.”

The 41-year-old father of three maintains the nomadic lifestyle typical of an actor. He’ll travel from Mississippi to work opposite Al Pacino in horror film The Ritual, then to New York for the limited series Zero Day alongside Robert De Niro before crossing coasts to shoot an untitled project with Lily James about the CEO and founder of Bumble. That’s a long way from the period pieces that littered his early filmography. “Yeah,” he says with a smile, “exactly.”