Sometimes, when people are lost, they return to a text or an idea to recalibrate the heart. For David Harbour, it’s a guy. This guy was a friend from college, a fellow fan of Samuel Beckett, who later became a Buddhist monk under the teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, the author and peace activist known as the “father of mindfulness”. So when Harbour went through a tough period at 30, he travelled out to his guy’s monastery in Escondido, California, to search for an answer and hang with the monks and the nuns. They meditated, they performed tea ceremonies, they took walks in the mountains. But mostly, they just talked. “You just talk about life,” says Harbour. “You drink your tea, taste your tea, breathe, realise you're alive in the present moment. And, you know, play volleyball or ping-pong with the monks. God, they’re fucking good volleyball players, too.” He adds, wide-eyed, as if he’s still not over it: “Those fucking nuns are brutal.”
Harbour found it helpful – and still does. Every couple of years, he makes his way out to the monastery to talk about whatever he’s going through. He hasn’t been in a while, though: things have been busy. There’s the release of Thunderbolts next month – the second appearance of Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian in the MCU – in a story about antiheroes and redemption. (He wants to take his monk to the premiere in LA, but monks can be tricky to pin down). There’s Stranger Things – the 2016 word-of-mouth hit Netflix show that changed Harbour’s life – coming to an end with its fifth and final season, which took a full year to film. There’s also his personal life, which has become an intense interest of the tabloids with the end of his relationship with pop star Lily Allen. “Oh boy,” he says, looking at me warily across the table when I bring it up. He orders another black coffee.
From the outside, this looks like a period of jarring change. But for a guy who has become famous for roles in which he is punching people in the face, Harbour is unexpectedly zen about most of it – or at least he’s trying to be. For him, processing this is all part of an ongoing, spiritual quest that began long ago. A conscious, attempted acceptance. Some kind of surrender.
When audiences first met chief-of-police Jim Hopper in Stranger Things almost ten years ago, Harbour was trying something different: he was letting go. As the camera pans across a crayon drawing by a daughter we come to learn is dead, Hopper wakes on his sofa amid the disarray of his cabin with her blue hair-tie around his wrist. It’s the first thing he glances at before the watch that tells him he’s late for work. “I was always kind of like all actors – kind of bullshitty, working out, and trying to… whatever,” says Harbour, rolling his eyes. He was making it about him, rather than about the work. “And then on [Stranger Things], I just stopped working out. I just ate doughnuts, like a cop would in the Midwest. And I didn’t shave. And I was just like: fuck it. He’s a mess. Let him be a mess. And let me be a mess while we’re shooting.”
Harbour was in his late 30s. He was depressed and alone and in Atlanta, where Stranger Things is filmed. As an actor, he had accepted that fame was not on the cards for him; he was always going to be the fifth guy on the call-sheet, whose name wasn’t on the poster. “I had got to a place in my life where I knew it wasn’t going to happen for me,” he says. He motions towards me: “Like, I knew I was never going to be interviewed by GQ. I was one of those guys.”
Look back at his filmography and Harbour has been in loads of stuff you saw before you knew his name. He was the neighbour secretly in love with Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road. He was the third gay cowboy in the two-gay-cowboys movie, Brokeback Mountain. He was CIA agent Gregg Beam, aka the guy with the moustache, in the 2008 Bond film Quantum of Solace, largely regarded as the worst of the Daniel Craig era. “I probably attribute that lack of success to the moustache,” says Harbour, when I suggest that his fame grew with his facial hair – almost a scientific truth if you don’t count this Bond film. “The world was not ready, and they rejected it”.
So when he landed Stranger Things, Harbour decided to throw everything into it – to play the role for the role itself, not for some bigger, better job it might get him next. “I guess you get to a place where you realise, Oh, this isn’t going to happen. And you experience that sadness, and then you just kind of giggle. Like, What am I sad about?! Like, What did I miss? What is the big… Who cares?! And then, through that, there is a feeling of grace or peace.”
His acceptance fed into the character, a kind of fuck-it attitude that gave Hopper his appeal. He decided to let himself go “psychically [and] emotionally.” He thought: “I can go to these dark places.” He let his body go to such an extent that in the months between being measured for his costume and actually wearing it, he had outgrown it. When Hopper drags himself off the sofa and stands smoking a cigarette while shivering in the cold morning mist, his jeans are hanging wide open. “That’s not because I didn’t have time!” he laughs. “[The costume department said] ‘Oh my God! Get the new jeans!’ But I was like, we just won’t button up. It’s fine. Let’s roll it.”
Harbour finds all of this hilarious. When he talks about his body, and how it has expanded and shrunk for so many roles since then, it’s like it’s an entity separate from himself; a tool to tell a story. He never predicted that Hopper would land him on social media appreciation accounts with names like I ♥︎ DILFs. “At the time, when I was still in my romance period with social media, I was like, Oh this is great, culturally. We’re letting people have real bodies. It was like, Oh – the guy with love handles, who’s a mess? That’s the guy you love? OK! Good for you guys!” No one knew Stranger Things would go on to have the wild success that it did (it is the second most-streamed show on Netflix of all time). But, for Harbour, this wasn’t just another role – it was an experiment in loosening his grip.
Harbour can be an intense dude – he will tell you this while ripping the piss out of himself, because he’s aware of it now – although the dial has recently been dialled down from 11. When Stranger Things won Best Ensemble in a Drama Series at the 2017 SAG awards, he gave an impassioned speech about how good acting can change the world. It went viral not just because of his rousing call for acceptance of freaks and outcasts with joy and love a week after Trump had been inaugurated for the first time, but because a surprised Winona Ryder was standing beside him pulling memeable faces that endearingly undermined any of his big-hearted earnestness. When he talks now, it’s as if he’s also providing the Winona face-track for anything he says. But had this success arrived in his 20s, back when he was rehearsing his Oscar acceptance speeches and Letterman interviews in the mirror, it would have hit him at a different angle. “I think I would have, for lack of a better word, created a lot more suffering for myself and for others. Certainly for myself, in terms of taking myself seriously,” he says. “That’s part of the problem – people believe the hype, they get into the image, they forget that it’s all just... I mean, I’m not the same person I was this morning. It’s all impermanent. It’s all gonna change. It’s all gonna die. And that’s very, very much deeply in my heart now. At 20, [life] was gonna go on forever.”
He attended Dartmouth, a prestigious Ivy League college, where he was “a big theatre geek writing manifestos about Brechtian alienation”. He dressed in black and fully believed his little non-profit theatre company in New York (named after some obscure Shakespearean reference he was still embarrassed to say aloud in an episode of Marc Maron’s podcast WTF over 20 years later) was going to change humanity. “I used to have big old rallying cries of, like, I’d rather be Bertolt Brecht than Brad Pitt!” he says now, Winona-facing. “That sort of ideology. I was real pretentious. I can laugh at it, but I do think it serves young people to be full of pretentious belief. Because what keeps you around when it starts to die and crumble and you realise that nothing’s gonna change?”
As his 20s went on, he hung his hope on other gods. At 24 he stopped drinking and got sober (and has remained so, minus one minor slip, for 25 years), and his sobriety corresponded with being able to pay his rent through acting – both on- and off-Broadway. But without the numbing effects of alcohol, Harbour saw other problems with sober clarity, and went in search of answers in religion – with varying effects. In the midst of a religious mania in his mid-20s, he spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In AA, members are encouraged to believe in a higher power – a non-denominational entity greater than themselves. Some choose God, others choose nature. Harbour landed on Catholicism and the mystic saints: those saints who get their own separate category because they had some kind of ecstatic experience with the divine; an emotional, bodily connection to God. (There are elements of Catholicism that are, to be blunt, quite horny. This is one of those.) Harbour read Teresa of Ávila, the nun immortalised in marble as she swoons in ecstasy while an angel holds a spear over her heart, who wrote that she felt both intense pain and all consuming love when the angel pierced it over and over. He read John of the Cross, who gave us the phrase “dark night of the soul”. And then there was St Augustine, who was kind of a sex addict and called himself a slave of lust in his written confessions.
The thread between them, and the pull for Harbour, was that they felt something intensely. “As an actor, that's always been my focus, too,” he says. “I'm always doing this stuff called sensory work, which is based on experiencing life. Like, what is my experience of maybe something simple – what's my experience of a tree? But then, what's my experience of my mother's hand as she's dying? Or like, what's my experience of falling in love when I was 16? All these things that I feel are the best portions of my life. I can buy clothes, I can do all this shit, but what I really have is my experience of love, my experience of hatred. So, reading these mystic saints, it felt like the pure heroin of fucking experience: these people were really in touch with something deep and profound.”
When Harbour next sees his monk, he will have a lot to talk about. Two huge things that have defined his 40s, and his fame, are ending: Stranger Things and his marriage.
The latter has been tabloid fodder for months; Harbour hasn’t commented on it publicly, and still doesn’t want to talk about it now. When I broach the subject, there is a pause so long that had our conversation been over Zoom I would have assumed the internet connection had died. “I'm protective of the people and the reality of my life,” he says, eventually. “There's no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it's all based on hysterical hyperbole.” It’s not that he won’t talk about deeply private experiences – like his bipolar diagnosis – it’s just that this one won’t serve anyone or anything other than encouraging “a salacious shitshow of humiliation”.
It’s his first run-in with the downside of being famous, but Harbour says that the bad and the good are both one and the same. “It’s all just ego,” he says. “It seems kind of silly to say this, but the art that I'm creating is about you. It's not about me. It's about your experience of life. We get hung up on [the person themselves], and I think we get lost in the idea of, like, what it's really about. And I think, for me, it's dangerous, too, to get lost in the personality in any way.” He points to his 20s as a cautionary tale for taking himself too seriously. “This is another version of that. And it's a version of that whether [the attention is] good or bad, or indifferent, or not indifferent. But whether it's good or bad, it's the same thing. It's the same feeling: it's this feeling of grasping and permanence. It's this feeling of like, Oh, now they love me. So do you like me now? Do you like me now? And what about now? And it's, oh, now they hate me. Well, you hate me now. Do you hate me now? It's, like, whatever. I'm human. I'm working through stuff.”
He’ll save it for the monk.
As for Stranger Things, saying goodbye to Hopper this late in the story is something Harbour initially didn’t think should have happened. Before it became a phenomenon for Netflix, and there was a high chance it would run for only one season like any other show, Harbour read the scripts and was convinced the first season should have ended with Hopper dying by suicide. To him, it was the only way Hopper could apologise to his daughter. Then between seasons three and four we thought he did die: disintegrating in an explosion when Joyce (Ryder) closed the gate to the Upside Down. To us, it looked like poetic self-sacrifice, and although there was a teaser that hinted he was alive and imprisoned in Russia, few took the bait. “I think they were just committed to the beauty of that moment of his death,” says Harbour. “It was so moving that I think they almost didn't want him to be alive.”
During all of that were a million bruises and punches and fingers bent the wrong way in scrappy fights against evil, both Upside Down and right way up. When I voice a hope that season five goes a little easier on Hopper, at least in terms of brutal physicality, Harbour gives me a look like: brace. “We shot a lot of nights, and there is a lot of action, and we're fighting evil in a very direct way. Hopper is a man of action – there's a lot of running around.”
Filming the final season was, for Harbour, a blur – a year-long shoot for eight long episodes; such a huge and unprecedented undertaking it is hard to hold it in his head. But he remembers one particular day of filming, right before the end. It wasn’t the last day – it was the one just before it, the one without the hoopla of finality, when it was just him and these kids he met 10 years ago who are now all in their early 20s: Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, the whole gang. He went to them one by one, and told them how he’d seen them grow, that he was proud of them, and reminded them all of what it was that made them special. “I just care about their lives as people and as artists, because I saw them when they were young, trying to do something real,” he says. “It’s why we cast them: because they were different than other kids. I’ve always wanted them to preserve that. It’s my thing with artistic integrity – I’ve always wanted them to know where their specialness comes from. That it's not from how many followers they have or how much they sell, it's that we saw something in them. They were trying to tell stories in real ways that was different than thousands of other kids that we saw.”
Harbour sees this part of his life as neither an end nor the beginning of a new era, but a continuum. “There's a lot of change – a tremendous amount of change,” he says. “And I think in that world, you have two paths. You can deny this change, be afraid of this change, you can kind of be chaotic about it and, like, eat your way through – whatever you need to do. Or you can sit with however uncomfortable, or weird, or new, it makes you feel. And then, for me, always the best thing that I can do is take all of that experience and pour it into work, because my experience, no matter how awful or great, will always be useful to someone else if it's channelled through art. I can always be of use. And so that's what I'm doing.”
He says his new HBO show, DTF St Louis – about a middle-aged love triangle that ends in murder, which he’s just finished filming – has been a way of channelling everything he’s dealing with: “[It’s] a very adult show about a very complicated person”. But there’s also Thunderbolts, a film he says taps into themes he knows all too intimately: being self-important, believing your own hype. “It's a movie that, in its essence, has a lot of thematics around mental illness and around the fact that superheroes, when acting alone, or when superpowers are used alone, they'll self-annihilate. I mean,” he says, knowingly: “It's gonna destroy you.”
With Thunderbolts and the just-announced Avengers: Doomsday, Harbour is becoming a regular face in Marvel movies – although it comes at a strange time, when not everything they put out is a guaranteed winner (in 2023 The Marvels flopped and earlier this year Captain America: Brave New World only narrowly escaped the same doom). Harbour sees this dimmed spotlight on Marvel as another opportunity. “The funny thing about [Thunderbolts] is it does feel like it was thrown together – these characters that not many people know…what are they doing together? How does this relate to the whole universe in general? People are like, What the fuck is this? And I’ll tell you what: I really like it. Because it gives us an opportunity to go back to the origins of what it is they’re trying to do. You don’t want to be a building block in a piece that’s moving in a certain direction; you want to create something,” he says. “We got an opportunity [with Thunderbolts] – because of the lack of expectations – to play the shit out of it.”
Ultimately, Harbour just wants to offer up something emotionally real as a way of expanding a sense of empathy. “It’s sort of the role of art,” he says, “I'm never that interested in heroic characters that are just fucking capable because that'll reinforce your worldview… I like flawed people – I think everyone is flawed, I just think it's whether or not you hide it. It's nice to be in a position to expose the fact. It’s nice to be able to be flawed.”
Harbour’s cab is about to arrive to take him to the airport, where he will fly to Las Vegas to appear at CinemaCon. In the time he has downed three black Americanos, during an interview he tells me he had been dreading, I feel like I’ve made him scoop out his insides. It feels heavy. So I ask, simply, if he’s good. “You know, it's not that things ending aren't hard, but it's just that I'm choosing to make it a period of growth. And I feel like having the opportunity to be busy and work is really good, and also to delve into this deeper spiritual quest, which I've been on since the mystic saints days… I think I'm good. It's less of a kind of triumphant good, more of a like…” He stops to find the words. “I'm learning how to swim in this – whatever it is. Learning how to float. Learning how to make it not about me.”
Styled by Itunu Oke
Grooming by Davy Newkirk @ The Wall Group
Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull
