During the first 16 years of David Harbor’s acting career, he enjoyed success in Broadway theater (including The Invention of Love, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and On Utopia Shores), as well as supporting roles in television (Pan Am, The Newsroom) and movies (Quantum of Solace, State of Play, The Equalizer).
“I really enjoyed being seventh on the call sheet for things like Denzel Washington’s action movies and starring in plays at the Public Theater in New York,” he says. “It was a wonderful life, a wonderful life, living in a one-bedroom in the East Village.”
At the age of 41, Harbor was cast as Jim Hopper, the chief of police in Hawkins, Indiana, in Stranger Things. He was the only adult male lead (opposite Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers) on the show, which featured an almost exclusively young cast. His life has never been the same. The show became an instant global hit on Netflix, and Harbor was catapulted to the top of the call sheet within weeks. Throughout the five-season run of Netflix’s hit series, Harbor headlined the Hellboy reboot in 2019, played the cool Santa in 2022’s Violent Night, and joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the Red Guardian in 2021’s Black Widow, 2025’s The Thunderbolts, and 2026’s The Avengers. Doomsday. ”
Since wrapping production on the final season of Stranger Things in 2024, Harbor has already filmed a new limited series for HBO, the dark comedy DTF St. Louis starring Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini, and a sequel to Violent Night, both scheduled for 2026. In late September, Harbor spoke to Variety during the latter’s production and talked about the end of Stranger Things and the show’s creators, Matt and Ross. Duffer, the magazine’s October 15 cover article. (This interview predated reports that co-star Millie Bobby Brown had filed a harassment complaint against Harbor before the filming of Season 5, as well as the announcement and subsequent release of ex-wife Lily Allen’s new album West End Girl.)
Harbor talked about the impact Stranger Things has had on his life. How the show’s huge success changed that, for better or worse. and how his character evolved over five seasons.
Ross Duffer and David Harbor on the set of Stranger Things 5 with Matt Duffer, Millie Bobby Brown and Winona Ryder in the background
Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix
You’ve said before that going into season one, you thought Hopper was a make-or-break role for you. Did you realize then that this show had the potential to become what it is now?
No, you probably know more about the business model of how a service like Netflix operates than I do. But we started the show in the fall of 2015, and the model for Netflix original series was something like “House of Cards” or “Orange is the New Black.” I thought this was like a science fiction show, that some people would really enjoy it and others wouldn’t be interested in it. But I never imagined that it would come to have such universal appeal in a zeitgeist-like way.
What has Stranger Things brought to your career and life?
A lot of people know me now and I have a certain type of fan base because of that. So career-wise, it opened up a ton of doors. I mean, I’m interested in what happens after “Stranger Things” right now in terms of going through those doors. I’m starting a new HBO show in January, and me and Jason Bateman and everything else is in the works, so that’s what I’m focused on right now.
By the way, would you have asked me that question seven years ago? It just tore apart the entire concept of what I would become. At 35, I reached a point in my life. I really enjoyed being seventh on the call sheet for things like Denzel Washington action movies and starring in plays at the Public Theater in New York. It was a wonderful life, a wonderful life, a one-bedroom rental in the East Village, and Stranger Things changed that entire life in many ways. I think the only thing that hasn’t changed is my intentions, and my intentions have always been to tell beautiful, strange stories that open people’s hearts. It was the same before Stranger Things and it was the same after Stranger Things, but everything else has changed.
Why do you think this show has endured as a huge hit for so long? What do you think is the core of its appeal?
Perhaps you know it better than me. What do you think it is?
I’ve asked a lot of people that question, and one of the things that people have really pointed out is that because of the breadth of the ensemble, there’s a character that basically everyone can relate to, and it’s a story of people who are outsiders fighting back.
Well, the outsiders who fight back have changed over the years. As the season progressed, we saw an increased interest in empathy. Vecna became very important. The monsters themselves become more human, and we are supposed to understand them and have feelings for them. Whereas in Season 1, it was really the villainous outsiders who were destroying the company. It was an interesting change in terms of what they focused on and how they detailed that story.
At best, I think all the characters and story beats move at the same pace, which is difficult for screenwriting. Screenplays usually focus on characters or on plot. “Stranger Things” does both at the same time in a very sophisticated way. The other thing is, we love Star Wars, right? We love “The Lord of the Rings.” I think what Stranger Things is trying to do, rather than reboot Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, is take archetypes or metaphors or words or characters and create new texts from them. Hopper is Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Gandalf the Gray. There are archetypal metaphors living in our subconscious movie lexicon, and we love them. “Stranger Things” just reinvented them with Eleven, Hopper, and Max. Don’t be afraid to play some really powerful power chords.
What was the experience like being directed by the Duffer brothers when the show started?
I think when we started, they were a lot greener and the show was a lot less dangerous. In the first season, we were a forgettable show. I don’t even know how much money they spent on the show, but it wasn’t a lot of money and there were no executives there. No one was watching what we were doing. I think they helped me and Winona in more ways with the bigger dialogue-heavy scenes. Not that every day wasn’t great, but I remember being a little more free-spirited.
How has it evolved over the past decade?
As their aesthetic became what they wanted, they started to get more specific about things like camera movement and shots, structure and cuts. I think we’ve gotten more accurate as the show has grown in popularity and the money and stakes have increased. They were always very generous to me. They always valued me as a performer and really appreciated what I brought to the character and wanted me to lead him. We spent years before each season talking about what direction we wanted Hopper to go.
The problem with television is that Gilligan has been on the island wearing a red shirt and bucket hat for 10 seasons. I get bored easily, so I wanted Hopper to be a different person. From the man in Season 1, to the overly protective and overbearing father in Season 2, to the 80’s detective in Season 3, Magnum PI, to the gaunt, brutal resurrected warrior in Season 4, to now Season 5 – we don’t know who he is this season. But we were very cooperative about where we could take him. They’re very smart people and they really know how to tell a story.
Lastly, as one of the only adults who has had a lot of experience with this show, I wanted to hear what it was like inside for something like this to happen.
It would be difficult for me to really talk openly about these things. Because of the behavior that people are doing today when trying to discuss something that I feel is very three-dimensional and very complex.
gain something and lose something. As you know, Hopper no longer smokes on the show. It’s a direct result of popularity. Because you have such a large audience, you try to continue to appeal to that large audience, but when you have a large audience, you want a soft edge. This is an interesting conundrum that is dealt with in pop music, pop culture, and all kinds of popular entertainment. So, for me, I prefer the freedom of the first season, where no one expected anything, as opposed to the pressure we had in the fifth season. Still, I love being noticed, I love getting as wide an audience as possible, and I love moving the most people with what you do.
This is exactly what entertainment struggles with. I think it’s all about getting something out of it. Obviously, clearly. And sometimes we get nostalgic thinking back to those days when we were naive and had all the freedom in the world because no one expected anything from us.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
