Prey, the latest Predator movie, is a very good action movie. And part of what makes it all work is its new Predator, a lankier and more hot-headed intergalactic hunter portrayed by a six-foot, eight-and-a-half-inch-tall actor named Dane DiLiegro who, we are pleased to report, used to be an Anthony Bourdain-inspired food vlogger.
On DiLiegro’s YouTube channel, last updated two years ago, the future alien menace is just a guy making cartoon expressions in video thumbnails and filming himself doing stuff like visiting “the MOST FAMOUS BUTCHER IN THE WORLD” or telling the internet, “i found UNDERGROUND CHEESE!”
The videos are what you’d expect. DiLiegro heads to different places—mainly Italy in the videos posted on YouTube—and shows off local foods and the people who make them.
As explained in a New York Times article, DiLiegro “dreamed ... of being the next Anthony Bourdain, hosting a show on culinary travel.” During this period, he apprenticed with a Tuscan butcher (the “MOST FAMOUS BUTCHER IN THE WORLD” featured in the above video), and created his YouTube channel and the Adventure Monday show “to pitch to producers.”
Before this, DiLiegro, perhaps unavoidably for anyone who stands nearly seven feet tall, spent many years playing professional basketball in Europe. Knowing that he couldn’t work as an athlete forever, he tried to get his food vlogger career going but ended up being pulled in a different direction.
DiLiegro took a job as an actor’s stand-in and was told by a stunt coordinator that he should start going out for roles as monsters. Soon enough, DiLiegro was in a Korean Netflix show, Tom DeLonge’s Monsters Of California, a Disney+ show, an episode of American Horror Stories, and, eventually, Prey. He “learned how to mime” and “studied acting.” As the Times article quotes him, he would like “to play a human, too” at some point.
We’d like to think, though, that none of these studies prepared him for the role of an apex predator that travels far and wide in search of exciting new organisms to kill quite as well as his time as a food vlogger. After all, wasn’t it the butchers of old who first gave us the eternal maxim, “if it bleeds, you can cook it?”
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