One of the strangest things that has ever happened to David Harbour is becoming a star so late in life, thanks to his role as Stranger Things police chief Jim Hopper. The cranky, melancholic character is the closest thing the Netflix series has to an adult romantic hero, and it nabbed Harbour his second Emmy nomination for supporting actor in a drama series.
In his nearly two-decade-long career in theater, film, and TV, Harbour has played bad cops and child murderers, and will soon be playing the lead role in the forthcoming Neil Marshall movie Hellboy. As someone who once felt he wasnt “pretty enough or interesting enough” to be in the pages of Vanity Fair, Harbour has enjoyed using his new celebrity platform to speak out about issues, as he did in his famous acceptance speech at the Screen Actors Guild Awards last year or his Greenpeace expedition to Antarctica this past February.
While shooting photos for V.F.s “Above the Law” portfolio in our second special Emmys issue, Harbour spoke to me about embracing the monster inside him for Hellboy, whats coming in Stranger Things Season 3 for Jim Hopper, and his own youthful encounter with the law.
Vanity Fair: Youve played a wide array of characters over the years. Is it more fun to play someone upholding the law or breaking the law?
David Harbour: Thats a good question. I think that they offer different things that are fun. The thing about psychotic people is that they live without social law. . . . There are certain societal laws that are just accepted things that are arbitrary. I think the fun thing about psychotics is that they question that. It can be very freeing . . . like, my ego or my individuality trumps societys law. In that way, it can be very fun to sort of impose your will on the world. Whereas, cops are upholders of this societal law, upholders of the arbitrary. In that way, they are in a way more complicated because they have their own moral conundrums about that, which you see in Hopper. . . . I like the tension of the good guy. Ive so often played the bad guy in my career, up until Hopper. I think that I like the tension good guys live with.
Hopper is not a straight-arrow cop. Did you have a sense from the start of how he was going to evolve?
Right from that opening, you see him hungover on the couch. And even from that first scene with Joyce [Winona Ryder] where he makes fun of, or at least questions, her missing kids sexuality by implying that he might be gay . . . I think that he is at his heart a very good dude, but I dont think at the beginning of the pilot he is a good person. I think hes a shell of what he once was, and hes gotten very dark and very crusty. I like that.
One of the things about having played a lot of villains is . . . I dont have the same experience of someone who maybe has been a leading man since they were 22, and therefore looks at certain things in a character to romanticize themselves. I actually very much embrace the bad stuff. Thats the stuff Im comfortable in, the stuff that bucks society or is provocative to society. Like, why should I behave the way you think I should behave? I like that aspect of him, I thought that was really fun to play. Theres the Captain Americas who are always making the right decisions. . . . I love that Hopper makes a lot of the wrong decisions for the right reasons, and a lot of the right decisions for the wrong reasons. That sort of moral ambiguity, along with the pressures of this maintaining society and [the city of] Hawkins and this idea of justice is . . . its really rich.
In Season 2 he evolved into a more heroic character, and yet he still keeps making questionable decisions.
In the first season, it was much more about the idea that he felt the universe was an unjust place, that he had lost a daughter to cancer. . . . The first thing that ignites him is that people are lying to him. Its actually his sense of ego that prompts him into this fight, but he starts to develop this thing for justice. Whereas, in the second season it became a much more personal journey. . . . He makes a lot of mistakes with [Eleven], I think. That I love, too, because it makes me question what kind of father he was like to his own daughter and what kind of man he is in general.
Are we going to get more a sense of his backstory in Season 3?
Yeah. The great thing about this show is, we throw out the model every season. Season 1 was a very Stephen King thing, and then Season 2 came along and I feel like we did something very different. Maintaining the same elements, but it was very different. Much bigger and Spielberg-y . . . like putting Hopper and Eleven together is a weird thing to do after Season 1. I think we do some even weirder stuff in Season 3. I think its always about pushing the envelope.
In terms of Hopper, all the things that weve had from Season 1 and Season 2 come to a boiling point for him in the beginning of Season 3. Its really interesting to watch, because weve sort of cleared up the main problem. You see in the end of Season 2 that the Upside Down is still kind of there, but we really sort of solved it. We closed the gate. So, this is a year for Hopper of real domesticity. Elevens been validated, she has a birth certificate. Shes a part of the world in some way. Its really how Hopper deals with domestic issues, like real day-to-day stuff, that takes him to this place of . . . he might be better at drama than he is at just sort of . . .
Just hanging out?
Right. So, what that does to him is very, very interesting. Well start to really understand a lot more about what he needs and what he doesnt have and who he wants to be that might take him in different directions.
Is there a little romance [with Joyce] coming?
Uh . . .
Blink once for yes and two for no.
Heres the thing. I do think it is the one thing that he doesnt have. The great thing about Season 1 was that he was messing around with all these young, emotionally unavailable women, like the librarian. He couldnt be vulnerable with a woman on an adult level. Then, in Season 2 he gets to relive his fatherhood experiences and really understand how to care for a child. Weve seen him kind of as a dad and as a cop, and we havent seen him as sort of a man, in terms of having a real equal woman to tangle with. I would like to see that.
Well, we know he left [Joyces love interest,] Bob, for dead.
Left him for dead? He was still struggling! He was still struggling . . .
You gave a very passionate speech at the SAG Awards. I wonder if the [current] political environment has made you sort of think differently about storytelling and what you do?
I dont know that its made me think differently, but I know that its made it more necessary in my mind. I think that one of the things that I sort of see is the idea of compassion or empathy . . . I feel like that is starting to sort of erode. I think people feel like other people are very different from them. . . . And that people who are different from them are actually sort of unworthy of the same rights or empathy. I dont understand that.
I think that storytelling, at its essence, allows us to feel like we all suffer the same insanity or a similar insanity of existence, that nobody escapes scot-free. Were all going to wind up—at the best-case scenario—80, 85, 90, broken, in pain, and feeling like it was all a dream, and not really understanding the point of any of it. I think that storytelling links us and creates . . . more empathy for each other. One of the things Im very proud of with Stranger Things is it isnt strictly political, like Handmaids Tale, but what it does do is it sort of plays into these very basic themes of humanity, like, friends dont lie. [Its] a simple town of good neighbors, a time in America where being a good neighbor was just a taken-for-granted thing.
I do think the beginning of that speech was that we are all human beings and that art is meant to bring us together, and that what I was really challenging was the narcissism of our own industry, which has made me feel as if I were an outsider and I were a freak and I were not pretty enough or interesting enough to be on the pages of Vanity Fair.
Sorry.
[Smiles] Heres the thing. I want people to know that even though I am in the pages [of Vanity Fair] now, I am lost and confused and struggling with how to live well, as much as anybody. It unites us. . . . I want our stories to bring people together. I dont want them to look up at us with awe and wonder and think that we are somehow separate from them. I want them to know that were all human beings, and we just sort of have a craft and an ability to tell stories.
Meanwhile, youre playing Hellboy, right?
I am playing Hellboy. We wrapped [Season 2 of Stranger Things] in, I think, May or June of last year. Then I had the summer off, and then I went to Bulgaria in late August and started shooting Hellboy. . . . Its a classically complicated hero. Hes a creature that was meant to bring about the end of the world, and he just sort of wants to be a good guy. Hes got that complexity to him. Hes also a monster who lives among human beings, so hes in a sense fighting for human beings against his fellow monsters, and yet the humans hate him because they fear him and they think hes weird looking and everything.
Hes different.
Yeah, hes terrifying! Theres that question of, why am I fighting this battle? Just because of some sense of justice, or some sense of good? Its a really interesting question that sort of is at the core of him, that he struggles with . . . I know that [writer] [Mike] Mignola and [director] Neil [Marshall] and [producer] Lloyd [Levin] all watched Stranger Things and saw that in what I did there, which is similar. He has a heart thats really good and with a lot of this crusted-over stuff. What Im dealing with in Hellboy is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. Its very Shakespearean. Its demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude whos trapped in horrible circumstances whos just trying to be a good guy.
You cant get away from the monsters.
I have lived with monsters and sort of studied monsters for a lot of my life. My nephew, I took him to the zoo and he saw a spider, and he was so scared of this huge spider. He was so scared. I was like, “Whoa. O.K. Lets go.” And he was like, “No!” He just wanted to look at it. But thats the thing about us: the things that were most afraid of are also the things that we want to study. . . . In that way, monsters have always been appealing to me, because theyve been something where Im terrified of them and of that monstrous thing inside of me, as well. . . . Its been a subject of fascination, so its no surprise to me that Im playing monsters.
Have you had any run-ins with the law?
The fun one I can remember was in Times Square. I think I was 15, maybe 16, and I went to Times Square to watch the ball drop [on New Years Eve], because I grew up in Westchester. . . . I remember we had 40-ounce [bottles of] malt liquor or something in paper bags and we were walking past some horse cop—you know, the cops on horses? I said something stupid because I was drunk and young, and he, with his nightstick, just smacked that 40 right out of my hand. I was like, “Oh shit. You dont fuck with a cop on a horse.” Lesson learned.
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Joy PressJoy Press is a T.V. Correspondent for Vanity Fair. Her book, Stealing the Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, was released in February.
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