By the end of filming series three of Stranger Things, David Harbour knew that he was destined for a Russian jail. He knew that the season would end with the not-so-subtle hint that as police chief-cum-supernatural-monster-battler Jim Hopper, he would be captured by Soviet spies. And he was also aware that he would face years of fan theories breathlessly trying to predict how his stretch as an inmate would play out.
Two months after filming wrapped on the Netflix show, he was offered a completely different role to focus on: a has-been super-soldier in the new Marvel film, Black Widow.
“Then I read the script, called [Stranger Things writer-directors] the Duffer Brothers and went: ‘Guys, I hate to do this to you, but I’m doing a thing in a Russian prison,’” he chuckles, peering into a Zoom window. “They were like: ‘WHAT?’”
If there is one thing Harbour is known for, it’s playing the troubled yet big-hearted everyman who stumbles unexpectedly into a dramatic midlife second act. So Black Widow director Cate Shortland knew who to call when she needed an actor to portray Alexei Shostakov, AKA Red Guardian – an idealist eastern European ex-agent with a shot at redemption after Scarlett Johansson’s character breaks him out of jail. Although Shortland probably didn’t expect him to take the responsibility of acting like a Soviet spy quite so literally.
While on location for Black Widow, he began taking sneaky photos of sets and messaging the Duffer Brothers. Any info he could provide to keep the two productions feeling distinct, he sent over, be it related to sets (“I was like: ‘OK, there’s an orange colour in this one. Just don’t make the prison orange!’”), or his character’s individual take on prison grooming (“Alexei is big, with a beard and long hair, so I wanted Hopper to have a shaved head, be clean shaven, be very thin”). The main reason? People identify Harbour so strongly with his Stranger Things character, that he was worried they might end up linking the two. “It is a concern that people will go: ‘Woah! It’s a crossover!’ No guys, it’s a coincidence.”
Such are the challenges with a show as big as Stranger Things, whose last season obliterated Netflix’s viewing records in just four weeks. Although it is not hard to sympathise with people who struggle to distinguish Harbour from Hopper. Aside from the fact that his Hopper Dance has become a thing of meme legend, Harbour inhabits his turn as Stranger Things’ police chief like a second skin. He excels at veering between desperately hopeful attempts at making the world a safer place and a worldview that struggles to see beyond the bottom of a beer can. There is a good reason for him being monumentally convincing in his portrayal of an alcoholic with a troubled past who carries around a melancholy about the world’s unfairness. It essentially is the story of Harbour’s own life.
In his early 20s, Harbour struggled so intensely with alcoholism that at one point he contemplated killing himself. He says he probably would have gone through with it if he hadn’t owned a kitten at the time. “What stopped me was going: ‘I love this cat! Who will take care of this cat?’” he says. “Also I was horrified by the idea of dying in my apartment, not being discovered for a week and having a cat eat me.”
He found sobriety, but was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, aged 25, after a manic episode brought on by an obsession with finding answers to the world’s unfairness. After receiving treatment, he began managing his condition with medication and he had a realisation: the more he invested himself in his acting, the better his mental health became. Theatre became his passion: “I was able to do stuff on Broadway that was complex and really rich”.
TV and film, though, seemed like a lucrative if dissatisfying exercise in paying the bills. “In Hollywood, I was relegated to No 6 or 7 on the callsheet; I was basically the guy who runs after Denzel with a gun!” he laughs. “I’d let my heart go out of movies and TV. I’d said to myself: ‘There’s a function I serve in movies. I make money out of them.’”
But then came Stranger Things, where Harbour’s life experiences turned out to uniquely qualify him for the role of Hopper. Not least because Harbour knew how to play a fortysomething who felt unchallenged by his career. Cue rave reviews, global fame and the sneaking suspicion that his previous decades were just killing time. “I’ve always been waiting to be 40 years old. Even as a 20-year-old I never had that bounce or spring,” he smiles. “It makes total sense that I didn’t have success until I was able to embody in age the stories that I felt like I was born to tell.”
Hence also his presence in Black Widow. The film is Scarlett Johansson’s first outing as the focus of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, with the titular hero roped in to a plot to take down the brainwashing training camp that taught her to fight. To do so, she hooks up with the Soviet agents who once played her family on an undercover mission: Florence Pugh as her pretend sister, Rachel Weisz as her fake mum and Harbour as her pseudo father. Who has a serious dad bod.
“My belly is amazing! It sort of circles in front of me, independent of my own body!” he laughs, referencing a slo-mo shot where he sprints free of jail, voluminous tum rippling under a grotty tank top. He says it took serious commitment to his craft to develop it: “I just ate tons of doughnuts, sugar, all kinds of crap. It was great!”
It was not just the bulking up that he enjoyed about his character (he had to lose it all afterwards). He also has a degree of sympathy for the politics of the Red Guardian: a man so dedicated to the spread of communism that he has KARL and MARX tattooed on his knuckles.
“I don’t know that there’s anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology,” says Harbour. “If you work at Starbucks and you make the coffee, then you should own it. You’re the one making the coffee! But the fact is that the implementation of these things has led to some of the deepest fascism in our society, so people assume that ‘communism’ means ‘fascism’ to a certain degree. That’s a terrible thing.”
Harbour’s own politics are a little less severe than his character’s, though he is still keen for change. “The idea of a kindergarten-type society where we share things is my ideal society; as opposed to this world where we’re hunting and killing and destroying for our own personal hoarding, our own personal greed.”
Frankly, this isn’t that surprising. A worldview that is all about bringing happiness is very David Harbour – as anyone who has followed him on social media will know. In October 2017, a fan asked him how many retweets she’d need to convince him to appear in her high-school photograph. When Harbour replied, challenging her to get 25,000, she doubled her target and he turned up to her photoshoot to goof about with pom poms. He persuaded Twitterers to get him over 200,000 retweets so that he could travel to the Antarctic to show some penguins his “Hopper dance” from Stranger Things for Greenpeace. He even got ordained to conduct marriages, officiating at a fan’s wedding after they met his challenge of 125,000 retweets.
“There was a purity to the play of it that I really enjoyed – and it just translated. I had fun with it for like a year, couple of years solid,” he smiles. Until, that is, he withdrew from social media after the platforms increasingly made him feel “like a cog in a greedy tech machine that isn’t geared towards beautifying humanity in any sort of way”.
But at one point during lockdown last year, he tried to recapture the connection he once had. He found a community-based app, posted a contact number on Instagram and urged fans to message him. He sent personal video messages to people who variously gave him insights into being a key worker, told him how scared they were, or just talked about their knitting. He plunged himself into it, until the messages reached the hundreds of thousands and he could no longer keep up. “I just love that connection,” he smiles. “I just really love people; I love their stories.”
Any chances of him plunging back into social media haven’t been helped by the register office of Clark County, Nevada. So excited were they by the story of Harbour’s romance with the singer Lily Allen that, last September, they broke the news of their secret marriage to the world via Twitter: “There was once a time where what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas …” he grimaces.
The pair met in 2019, with Harbour moving into Allen’s home during the 2020 lockdown. Things accelerated when Harbour realised that Allen’s eight- and nine-year-old daughters [with previous husband Sam Cooper] were confused about his relationship to them: “I wanted to be very clear that I love their mother and that I wanted to take care of them and be there for them as a friend and stepfather.”
Lockdown meant that Harbour couldn’t do the acting that usually helps him with his bipolar. Instead he spent the months “doing things that are bigger than myself, trying to help people”, like starting a book on mental health. And when he didn’t have that, he was at least able to enjoy Barnard Castle-based furore. “Who was the guy? Dominic Cummings? That huge uproar … I was like: “I love this! The British people are holding someone accountable! If this was America we wouldn’t give a shit!’”
Hopefully he didn’t enjoy house arrest too much. After all, given the way that his career’s currently going, he doesn’t need convincing to spend any more time in jail. “I promise you, I’m not trying to mould my career, like: ‘Please put me in a Russian prison!’ he laughs. “It’s sheer coincidence! There’s no conspiracy going on!”
Let’s see how the next series of Stranger Things pans out, shall we?
Black Widow is in cinemas 7 July
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion