Predator: Badlands: 3 Grueling Trials Dek’s Actor Conquered to Disappear Into the Role

Predator: Badlands flips the franchise on its head. The lead this time is a Predator named Dek, and the guy inside that gnarly mask, New Zealand actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, basically turned himself into an elite athlete and linguist to pull it off. The movie hit theaters November 7, 2025, and it is already holding steady with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and $96.6 million worldwide. Not bad for a movie with zero humans on screen.

Meet the guy behind the mask

Schuster-Koloamatangi was born in Auckland on February 6, 2001, and is of Samoan and Tongan descent. He finished St Peters College in 2018 and graduated with a Bachelor of Communication Studies from Auckland University of Technology in 2023. He has talked about growing up without much Pacific Islander representation in big studio films, which makes landing Dek feel personal for him.

His first on-screen credit was a small role in the 2019 mini-series Jonah. Things picked up fast: he led 2021's The Panthers, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and got him into TIFF's Rising Stars program, plus a Best Actor nomination at the 2022 NZTV Awards. By 2023, he was co-starring in his first feature, Red, White & Brass.

The audition that became a workout reel

Director Dan Trachtenberg found him in a very un-Hollywood way: an obstacle-course audition. Schuster-Koloamatangi even improvised an alien-sounding dialect on the spot by blending Samoan and Tongan. Trachtenberg has said the way he powered through the course — sliding, jumping, leaping, swinging weapons — had more swagger than some stunt veterans, and that his physical instincts stood out immediately.

What it took to become Dek

Once he got the role, the real grind started. Production shot across rugged New Zealand landscapes, and Schuster-Koloamatangi had to do it all in a 33-pound creature suit while speaking a brand-new alien language built for the film. At one point he literally hauled co-star Elle Fanning on his back through mountains and rivers. To survive that, he trained with stunt coordinator Jacob Tomuri and fight coordinator Vincent Bouillon, using swords purposely weighted heavier than the screen-used props to build shoulder, arm, and leg strength.

"My body was constantly sore. I was constantly hot. It was constant discomfort, essentially, being in the suit," he told Men's Health.

He improvised a dialect in the audition; for the shoot, he then learned the finalized language and delivery the movie uses for the Yautja.

So what is Badlands actually doing?

This is the first Predator film with no human characters. None. The cast is split between Yautja and synthetics from the Alien universe's Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Elle Fanning plays two different synthetics, and Cameron Brown brings the drone units to life. Because synthetic blood reads green and white, the movie delivers plenty of combat on the hostile planet Genna while still landing a PG-13 rating. A very clever workaround for a series known for red splatter.

Trachtenberg's whole pitch is to lock us into the Predator point of view. Instead of treating the creature as a monster or sidekick, the story follows Dek on a dangerous proving mission entirely through his eyes. It is a big tonal shift for the franchise, and it lets the film dig into Yautja culture instead of treating it like window dressing.

The culture under the helmet

Schuster-Koloamatangi dove into the Yautja's code of honor and came away with a different read on the hunt. The species' obsession with trophies is framed as a response to an oppressive past: their ancestors used hunting as a way to reclaim agency, and the trophies act as tributes to those who fought before them. On paper it sounds brutal; in practice it is their ritual, built on memory and respect.

Dek himself is an undersized outcast. To earn his place, he has to track down the Kalisk — a nasty piece of work that can regenerate. That makes it less a chest-thumping power fantasy and more a survival story about a scrappy underdog who happens to be seven feet tall and covered in mandibles.

The numbers so far

• Release date: November 7, 2025
• Domestic opening weekend: $40 million (above the $25–30 million projections)
• Worldwide box office to date: $96.6 million
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 85%

Bottom line

Making a Predator the protagonist could have been a gimmick. Instead, it gives the series a lane it has never properly used, and Schuster-Koloamatangi is a big reason it works — the physicality, the language, the sheer endurance. Predator: Badlands is in theaters worldwide now. Are you into this perspective flip, or do you miss the humans-in-the-jungle setup? Tell me.