As a hot, wet bunch of eucalyptus leaves roughly licks my lower right calf, like the tongue of a dog that’s chewed a menthol cigarette butt, David Harbour grunts contentedly, lying on the table next to me. To come here, a quaint Banya in West London, was his idea; now, a small, scantily clad Russian man is slapping the arch of our backs with a bundle of fragrant twigs and foliage.
We’d arrived around an hour earlier, on this greyish morning in June, greeted chirpily on the door by a receptionist on first-name terms with the Strangers Things star. After a quick change into towels, we’re sat across from one another in the bathhouse tea room, the table between us providing something in the way of modesty. The walls are adorned with the sort of Soviet cartoon prints you’d ascribe to an old Cold War movie. “You can get all kinds of stuff here — borscht…” Harbour says, as an attendant places between us a pot of chai and a bottle of Borjomi.
Harbour is best known for playing Chief Jim Hopper, Stranger Things’ portly lovable rogue. During our first conversation, part one of the fourth season has just arrived to rapturous acclaim. The final duo of episodes – which we discuss in detail later – is due out the week after our treatment. According to Netflix, the season four debut was the streamer’s biggest English-language TV opening ever. As with previous seasons, Hopper has been a firm fan favourite for the open-wound vulnerability he brings to the role.
“I like people that attempt in big ways, and fail,” Harbour says. Hopper is certainly that: over the course of four seasons, he emerges from a dungeon of depression to routinely risk it all for his adopted family, not least surrogate daughter Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown). It is also true of the actor’s other biggest roles to date — the socialist superhero Red Guardian in Black Widow, the titular demon Hellboy – both of whom are red-blooded and gruff, though not in the way of the ivory-teethed movie stars the boys of Stranger Things adore. For Harbour, the performance of manliness can often involve a deeply human (and demonic) weakness.
Harbour’s biggest fear is imprisonment. “Literally and metaphorically,” he says. He has a habit of looking around me while he speaks — not awkwardly, but deep in thought. “I often have dreams of going to prison. I know Freud has some kind of interpretation of that. But [whether it’s] artistically, or relationship-wise, or a lack of funds. Imprisonment is always my biggest fear.” Still looking into space, he takes a beat. “That and sharks.”
Harbour has spoken extensively about his lifelong struggles with “so-called mental health,” as he often puts it. After an episode that saw his parents send him to a mental institution at 26 years old, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Looking for the right noun, I ask: does his fear relate to that moment of incarceration? “I’d definitely call it that,” he says. “There was a locked door. But the great thing about that, though, is every day on the outside is a good one. After an experience like that, you really don’t need all that much. But I’ve been having that dream since I was 11 or 12.”
It’s also something that has found an odd echo in Stranger Things. When we meet Hopper again in the fourth season, he’s locked up in a Soviet gulag shot on location in an ex-Nazi prison in Lithuania, having miraculously survived a massive explosion at the end of season three (it was a bit of a fakeout, truth be told, with the audience led to believe he was dead until a suggestive post-credits scene). As one might expect, months of eating mouldy bread and gruel brings about drastic change in Hopper’s physique. “I lost about 80 pounds from season three — I was about 270 [then], and when we shot [season four] I was around 190,” Harbour recalls. He got into intermittent fasting and Pilates, shedding it all in eight months to strike his labour camp figure. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again,” he says. “I have this Santa Claus movie coming out for Universal in December” — Violent Night, which purports to be exactly what it sounds — “and I gained [it all back]. But now, yeah, never again. The prosthetics are too good.”
Harbour is currently starring on the West End stage in Mad House alongside Bill Pullman: the play, written for him by Theresa Rebeck, is inspired by his own bouts with self-described madness. “What’s amazing is you get 13-year-olds into the theatre,” he says “They want to see Hopper, and they do get to see [him], but then you’ve gotta spend two hours and ten minutes with me, so eventually you’re gonna have to listen to some of the play. And it might get a whole younger generation into the theatre, and keep theatre alive for a new audience. That would’ve never happened without Stranger Things.”
We take a break, peeling off to the sauna. A duo of handsome, chiseled men in swimsuits—Friday is a mixed day at the Banya, so partial nudity only—are sat inside the creaky, tenebrous steam room. Harbour sits against the wall, formed of scalding wooden planks, like a piercing hot radiator. I’m enveloped in a rushing film of sweat. “You’ll get used to it,” he says.
Harbour has previously dismissed The Method, the contemporary acting style du jour, but I’m curious to know whether he’s ever tried it. “I’m very much trained in classical American method acting,” he says, before diving into a two-minute-long, eloquent historical explainer, from Stanislavski (the Russian father of performance theory, essentially) to later practitioners at the Actor’s Studio in New York.
“When I was younger — it’s so embarrassing — but I remember playing that famous Scottish King,” he recalls, “And being like, ‘I’m gonna kill a cat’ or something: ‘I’m gonna go murder something to know what it feels like to murder.’ I didn’t actually do it, obviously. Not only is that stuff silly, it’s dangerous, and it actually doesn’t produce good work.”Daniel Day-Lewis, of course, is the preeminent, respectable example. “He’s an extraordinary actor who I’m captivated and fascinated by,” Harbour says, entirely earnestly. “[But] when he explains his process it sounds like nonsense to me.”
Harbour and his wife, the British musician and actor Lily Allen, have two stories about how they met: the fake, pointedly acceptable story that they ran into each other backstage at a talk show, and the truth, that they found one another on the ultra-exclusive dating app Raya. “I was in London alone, doing Black Widow, on this app, going on dates and stuff. And yeah, I started texting with her, she was in Italy at the time — we got together, went on a date at the Wolseley, and it was, you know, she’s fucking unbelievable.”
And when did he fall in love with her? “She claims to have fallen in love at first sight with me — I mean, who wouldn’t?” He laughs. “I remember the exact moment. It was our third date. I was just in this phase, where I was like, I’m just going to be brutally honest about everything, because why lie? And I told her something about my life, about my beliefs…” He hesitates. “It would take a really extraordinary person to be accepting of the things that I said. And I remember thinking: Wow, that’s somebody I want to be around.”
Our first meeting is nearing its end, and I can’t let him go without talking about Hellboy. Coming in the wake of the Stranger Things hype, it was Harbour’s first big movie lead, playing the titular demonic detective. But as a reboot of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptations — hugely popular in their own right — it was always facing an uphill battle. It tanked at the box office, and was mauled by critics.
“It was a very difficult experience because I wanted a lot out of it. I really like [Mike Mignola, Hellboy creator], I like that character,” he says. “And then immediately when it began, even when it was announced, I realised that people did not want that character reinvented. I was very naive and optimistic about what we were going to do.”
The day the film was released to theatres, and it became apparent that it was going to bomb, he called Ryan Reynolds. “I know him a little bit. I called him and I was like, Hey man, I just need to know something. You know Green Lantern? Huge flop for you. What the fuck is that like, because I think I’m going to hit that right now. Am I gonna be okay? Am I gonna survive this?” Reynolds, for his part, was “sweet” about it.
A week later, and the Stranger Things 4 finale has finally dropped. This time around, we jump on Zoom: Harbour’s in the back of a cab taking him to an evening Mad House performance. He hadn’t seen it when we last spoke — presumably he’s had the chance by now? “Yeah, I thought it was great. I loved it. It’s very moving,” he says, expectedly beaming.
He rattles off his favourite moments: Eddie’s heroic death (“pretty stunning”); El’s climactic mind battle with Vecna; the “Empire Strikes Back cliffhanger” which sees Hawkins torn asunder, doused in hellish flames. “There’s like, huge rift earthquakes going through all of Indiana, one would assume,” he says, chuckling. “So I don’t know what the fuck is gonna happen in season five now.”
Hopper’s drastic weight loss is the butt of the joke once reunited with Joyce and Murray, but hey, at least he was in good enough shape to take down a Demogorgon with a sword. “I don’t know if you saw this, but that sword I pick up — it’s the actual prop sword they used in Conan the Barbarian,” he says, excitedly. “It’s the sword that Schwarzenegger swings in the movie.”
But even beheading a monster from the Upside Down is no match for Hopper’s biggest finale moment. For the uninitiated: Stranger Things fans online have been clamouring for Hopper and Joyce to get together for as long as the series has streamed, and the last episode saw them finally share a kiss on screen. But was making ‘Jopper’ a reality always the plan?
“It’s always something that Winona and I have talked about — on set riffing about what their relationship was in high school, and y’know, who they are to each other,” he says. “There was always a tension between should this be consummated, or should they just be friends? And I do think it’s a bit of fan service. I think there was a real appetite for mommy and daddy to get back together again. And then once we were on that train, it seemed like an inevitability.”
By the end of the finale, Hawkins has been topographically ruined, a scorched, split wasteland infected by the Upside Down, and God knows what Lovecraftian horrors are going to emerge from the cracks. So, the most pertinent question of all: where are they with season five? “I think we’ll [shoot] next year. They’re finishing writing it this year, and they need to prep and stuff, so hopefully it’ll be this year,” Harbour says. “But I think that’s the plan. So it’d probably come out mid-2024, based on our track record.”
Season five is set to be the big series endgame, but given Stranger Things’ gargantuan popularity, some sort of continuation has to be on the cards. “I think as soon as the show ends, or maybe six months before it ends, you’ll be hearing about whatever spin-offs they have planned,” he offers. But I’m curious: by the way Harbour spoke about Hopper before, he seems ready to hand in the proverbial badge and gun.
“At this point, I think Hopper is a character that can exist independent of me. If they wanna go back in time, forward in time… I’d love to see another actor play Hopper, and see what they can bring to it.” In a later email, Harbour offers Euphoria star Jacob Elordi as his pick for young Hop: “He could pull off being as handsome as I was at 20.”
Stranger Things season four part two is out now. Mad House is at the Ambassadors Theatre until 4 September.
Photographer: Tung Walsh
Stylist: Angelo Mitakos
Groomer: Jennie Roberts at Frank Agency using Patricks M1 Matte Finish and Typology Tinted Serum and skin care
