Through the Dark
There’s a particular kind of artist who always seems to stand at the threshold – between mainstream and underground, horror and heart, performance and confession. Over the last decade,David Dastmalchianhas quietly become one of those figures: a shape‑shifting actor, writer and creative force who can slip from billion‑dollar blockbusters to deeply personal indie work, without ever losing sight of who he is or who he’s speaking to.
Now, as he steps into one of pop culture’s most iconic villain roles –M. Bisonin the upcomingStreet Fighter film – Dastmalchian does so carrying a lifetime’s worth of darkness, recovery, curiosity and compassion. It’s the same emotional DNA that runs through his haunting new comicThrough, and the same energy that’s made him, however reluctantly, a kind of modern horror icon. Someone put it to me recently that David is “the actor that brought goth to the mainstream and gave hope to millions of weirdos to find success and confidence within themselves.”
He laughs when I repeat that to him. There’s gratitude there, but also a palpable discomfort. “It’s humbling. I don’t know if I agree,” he says. “I’m just a guy out here trying to do what he’s done, and I don’t want really anyone looking at me for any sense of example, because I make so many mistakes…” Still, as we talk, it becomes clear that underneath all the genre trappings and iconic roles, there’s something very simple driving him: the hope that a story, told honestly enough, might make someone feelless alone.
Credit: J. Konrad Schmidt
Control, Compulsion and Owning the Monster
On paper, casting David Dastmalchian as M. Bison makes immediate sense. His career is full of characters who carry menace and vulnerability in the same frame, from his early appearance as a fragile, haunted figure in The Dark Knight, to unsettling turns inThe Boogeyman,Late Night with the Devil and beyond. But what makes the idea of his Bison genuinely exciting isn’t just theatrical villainy; it’s his fixation onpower and control– and the damage they cause, inside and out.
When David Dastmalchian talks about his creative life, he keeps circling the same major focus points: compulsion, attachment to outcomes and the illusion of being able to control other people, places and things. Those aren’t just themes in his work, they’re lived experiences. “One of the things that had evolved over the years for me as a coping mechanism with my fear and anxiety was this sense of dependence on other people and this dependence on control,” he says. “Trying to control the world around me… you cannot have true serenity until you’ve practiced acceptance and you’ve been able to let go of the notion that you can control other people, places, things, circumstances – it’s maddening.”
He describes hitting a breaking point: “I was in the midst of that major volcanic break in my life where everything that I had controlled and had control of suddenly shattered. The way that my family dynamic works, the way that my relationships worked, everything was kind of pulled from underneath of me, and I didn’t know how to cope.” It’s hard not to see the line from there to M. Bison – the pursuit if power, gone toxic. Dastmalchian knows that impulse intimately: “If I can just control enough, manage enough, hold everything tightly enough, maybe I’ll finally feel safe”.
David as M. Bison in Street Fighter
From Henry Darger to Alix: A Life’s Work in Secret
IfStreet Fighter pushes David into one of pop culture’s loudest spotlights, his new comic book Through is where he allows himself to be most exposed. The book began almost twenty years ago in Chicago, when he discovered the story of outsider artist – a reclusive janitor whose tiny apartment was revealed, after his death, to contain thousands of pages of wild, deeply strange fantasy writing and art, all created in secret. “I learned about this incredible artist named Henry Darger, who was someone who lived his life as a janitor,” David recalls. “When he passed away, they unlocked his apartment to clear it out, and they discovered a lifetime of this incredible work…I was obsessed with, fascinated with the idea of somebody creating something in such a hyper‑obsessive, secretive way. What was their intention, their motivation?”
At the same time, he was thinking about his own hidden work. “Whenever I’m trying to create art or tell stories, I always want to do so so that I can share it with people. And then I thought about the times in my life when I have crafted stories or written and kept all of it to myself… the secrecy of the years that I wasn’t sharing my work with anybody, the years that I was hiding my work from the world.”
Out of that tension cameAlix, the protagonist ofThrough: a young woman, who discovers that a strange man has spent his entire life creating a vast, obsessive body of work about her. “I started to think about this character who formed, this young woman who I wanted to live in Chicago,” he says, “and then suddenly, through an intersection with this mysterious, strange individual, to realize that this man had been crafting a life’s worth of work, not only in secret, that was all dedicated and about her.”
The concept stayed with him for years, evolving quietly in the background. “The idea started to unfold, much in the way that the plot of something, say, as incredible as Pan’s Labyrinth,” he says. “I keep thinking about, what does it mean? What are the symbols? What is the story? Where does the character go? What does she need? What is she going to accomplish? What is she not going to accomplish? Where will she fail? Will she die? Will she succeed?” Those questions hung around for a long time.
Sobriety, Collapse and Internal Family Systems
By the time he actually sat down to script Through, Dastmalchian had been clean and sober for a very long time. From a distance, it’s easy to imagine a tidy arc: man gets clean, becomes creatively prolific, achieves equilibrium. He’s blunt about the fact that it wasn’t like that. “I thought just by being clean of drugs and alcohol that, you know, I’d discovered true sobriety, or what it meant to be free,” he says. “And that’s not true.”
What he discovered, under pressure, was that he’d traded one set of addictions for another that was harder to spot: “One of the things that had evolved over the years for me… was this sense of dependence on other people and this dependence on control, trying to control the world around me, and the idea that control of people and places and things, will provide for me some sense of sanctity, security, safety. It’s all an illusion.”
He was overseas, filming a TV series, physically and mentally wrecked, when everything fell apart. “I was in the midst of that major volcanic break in my life… and I didn’t know how to cope. And so I was writing this book while I was doing therapy, while I was trying to recover…”
A huge part of that recovery involvedInternal Family Systems (IFS)– the therapeutic model created byDr Richard Schwartz that treats the psyche as a collection of “parts” and invites you to become a compassionate, self‑led parent to them. “I did an extensive amount of work, and I still have a lot of work to go, in a therapeutic module called IFS – Internal Family Systems,” he explains. “You go into [yourself] and you basically become self‑led. You learn how to parent the parts of yourself that have been rising up and screaming out and trying to clang the bells of emergency since you were a child.”
He talks about those parts with startling warmth. “They’ve ended up, in many ways, kind of steering the ship of your adult consciousness,” he says. “When you can get in there and listen to them and not scold them, not be ashamed of them, not try and push those default behaviours out of yourself, but you really listen to them and you thank them the way you would thank a child for screaming because it thinks it’s trying to help you… and you help them relax and get rest – the inner peace that is found with that… it’s been a great gift in my life.”
All of this was happening as he wrote Through. Therapy sessions, breakdowns, rebuilding, running in parallel with Alix’s journey on the page. “I was writing this book while I was doing therapy, while I was trying to recover, and it all kind of came together in a very almost alchemically cosmic way,” he says. “And I just trust the process. I think storytelling is quite mystical sometimes. And so I just went along, and I decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to keep writing as I’m learning.’ It turned out there was much more of me in Alix than I ever imagined.”
When I ask if he’s fully let go of that need to control, he refuses to polish it into a neat redemption arc. “I’m not there yet. I mean, I have a lot of work yet to go, and I may never achieve it,” he admits. “If I look at the journey I’ve been on, I’ve come very far up the mountain…on a day‑to‑day basis, I have found so much freedom from my compulsion and my compulsivity disorders and the desire and the needs to control people… these attachment disorders that I get when it comes to outcomes and the thoughts of expectation, especially around other people.” He credits neuroplasticity – “the miracle of my brain” – with slowly rewiring those patterns.
The hope, he says, is thatAlixcan find some version of that peace by the end ofThrough. Not a fairy‑tale cure, but the start of a different relationship with herself.
Soundtracking Through
Music is a constant in this story with David. If you want to understand where Dastmalchian’s head was while building Through, you can start with the artists he had on repeat. “Dirty Three was a big influence in the writing of the book,” he says. The Australian trio’s sprawling, wordless storms feel like the perfect accompaniment to a story about secret art, obsession and emotional rawness. Their songs stretch time, letting grief and hope occupy the same violin line. “Nick Cave was a big influence,” he adds. Cave’s work hovers over this whole project; a masterclass in marrying the sacred and profane, violence and vulnerability, horror and tenderness.
David also sank into more obscure corners. “There’s an orchestral band – it’s called Rachel’s,” he says. “They had written albums based around different artists, and they had an album that was music that was written for the artist Egon Schiele. And I found a lot of that music deeply influential.” Schiele’s twisted, exposed figures feel like visual cousins to Alix and the hidden work at the heart ofThrough.
Film scores were another essential pillar. “I was listening to a lot of film scores, a lot of the scores of the films of Stanley Kubrick, as well as the score from Pan’s Labyrinth, I found to be really helpful,” he says. Kubrick’s cold, uncanny use of classical pieces and Javier Navarrete’s lullaby‑sharp music forPan’s Labyrinthboth bleed into the DNA ofThrough: fairy‑tale logic wrapped tight around very real trauma.
Place matters too, so he went back to sounds of the region that formed him: “I was also trying to do some more Chicago‑based bands and bands from that part of the country,” he says. “So, like, Tortoise is really a cool one. The [Smashing] Pumpkins, yeah.” The result is a kind of emotional mixtape: part gothic waltz, part anxious chamber music, part bruised post‑rock.
Fear, Exposure and Creative Reward
For someone associated with huge ensembles and giant universes, Dastmalchian is crystal clear: writing a book like Through is the scariest thing he’s done. “With the book, there’s just a level of… I don’t know if I’d say freedom, because I felt very free in all of the projects in which I’m able to be creative,” he says. “Thankfully, I work with so many wonderful collaborators. But this is really, like, it’s on my shoulders, you know? This is all my…it’s my writing. These are my characters.”
On a film or TV set, the load is shared between hundreds of people. On the page, there’s nowhere to hide. “The experience that the reader is going to have is so…solely influenced by the narrative that I’ve created,” he says. “Luckily for me, I have the benefit of working with amazing artistic partners. So, for example, in Through, Cat Staggs, who’s just brilliant – her work is so gorgeous. She’s done such an excellent job bringing this to life. David Mack with the beautiful cover that, you know, will bring people into the story.”
The collaboration helps, but it doesn’t erase the vulnerability. “I do feel a sense of pressure when it’s a book like this, that I don’t feel when it is…when it’s a film or TV show,” he admits. “There’s hundreds of people involved, and it’s the writer and the director’s thing, and I’m a function of their storytelling process, if you will. With a book like this, it’s just…and it’s so naked. It’s so much of who I am internally, and who I’ve been and where I’ve been, and so much that’s up there that’s so revealing. So this is scary. It’s the scariest.”
Every time a new review or social post pops up in his mentions, he feels his stomach drop. “Every time someone tags me on social media in a review post, or someone has read it and they’ve posted something about it online, it’s just terrifying to look and see, like, what did they think? I hope they had a good experience. Yeah, it’s scary. It’s very scary.”
The Gift of Not Being Alone
“Beyond my love of just the mechanics of storytelling that I love so much,” he says, “is the dream that when a story is well told, the audience can feel a little bit less alone in the world.”
David is fiercely aware of forces telling us the opposite in 2026. “I think that there’s a dark force in the universe that inexplicably seems determined…maybe it’s something to do with physics, but [it] seems something to do with pushing particles away from one another,” he says. “And [it] seems… determined, with its negative charge, to convince the human mind that it’s alone in the world.”
Then he zooms out to the system level. “The functionality of capitalism is to convince the individual that they don’t fit in, that they’re alone, that they don’t belong, so that they’ll need the things which are produced to make them feel closer to the rhythm of the way that our system works,” he adds. “That rhythm is just constantly inundating us with this notion that, like, ‘If you just had this, if you just were that, you would be part of the whole.’”
His counter to all this is simple and quietly radical: “But the fact is, we’re all part of the whole no matter what we buy, wear, listen to, read, do, say, even in our worst form, even when we’re bad monsters, when we’re good monsters, we’re all part of that whole.”
If David’s work, whether it’s a horror film, a comic, a casket‑set podcast or a looming video‑game villain, can help anyone feel that truth in their bones, that’s the real win. “If I’m able in some way to contribute to someone out there’s notion that they’re not so alone in the world,” he says, “then to me, that is the ultimate achievement in life.”
He’s quick to deflect the praise outward, too. At one point, he stops to thank me.“You do the same thing, Dom,” he says. “I love the way that you share about music and art, and I think you’re a great, great ball of light in this very dark universe. So thanks for being who you are.” It’s disarming, but it’s also telling: in a culture obsessed with individual brands, David Dastmalchian is more interested in shared light – weirdos holding torches up for each other in the dark.
Monsters, Caskets and WrestleMania
Of course, this is still David Dastmalchian we’re talking about, a man perfectly capable of moving from deep therapy talk and critiques of capitalism to gleeful chat about wrestling, WrestleMania in Vegas, Cody Rhodes, or lying in coffins with guests on his show Grave Conversations.
At the start of our conversation, I tell him I think Grave Conversations is “the best idea I have ever seen in the world,” and he grins, immediately rattling off some of the musicians he’s already had in those caskets. “I was able to have the good fortune of Orville Peck coming and getting in there with me, obviously Weird Al – one of the greatest musicians of all time,” he says. “But, yeah, I’ve got my sights set on seeing if I can get Trent [Reznor] in there at some point… Can you imagine how cool it would be to lay side by side with Robert Smith?”
That’s his sweet spot: halfway between goth fantasy and spiritual group therapy, between the graveyard and the gig. We end up talking about Cody Rhodes, Roman Reigns, and David’s childhood “Backyard Barbarian” wrestling persona. Indeed, there’s a kid‑like excitement when the topic switches to WrestleMania and the Street Fighter film, which is packed with performers he clearly admires. “You can definitely tell everybody that I said that Cody Rhodes’ performance as Guile is going to be one of the highlights of Street Fighter,” he says. “And when everyone sees what Roman Reigns did as well, they’re going to freak out. It’s a great film. It’s really exciting.”
Whether he’s summoning monsters on screen, writing about obsessive janitors and haunted young women, or listening to his own inner-child, one thing is consistent: he’s always reaching outwards, towards connection. For our readers – the goths, punks, metal kids, neurodivergent creatives, horror obsessives and the weirdos, that’s where the real resonance lies. Underneath the awards, the Saturn Award wins, the franchises and the cult shows, he’s fundamentally doing the same thing you are: trying to make meaning in the dark, and maybe help someone else feel a little less isolated while he does it.
Maybe that’s the real through‑line of David Dastmalchian’s work right now – from ThroughtoStreet FightertoGrave Conversations, from therapy rooms to casket sets and comic‑con halls. Beneath the horror, the goth aesthetics, the villains and outcasts, there’s a quiet, insistent message: You are not alone in this.
Watch and listen below: