Those Duffer Brothers really know how to tell a story, and I think it makes you want to watch. 'Stranger Things' is remarkably watchable.
David Harbour
In a sense, human beings are human beings. Their feelings of aloneness, of brokenness, their feelings of hurt and disappointment, are universal. It's the ways they choose to act on their feelings that separates them.
Netflix sees people as users or subscribers or customers. Historically, networks have seen people as viewers.
People are three-dimensional. They're not good or bad. They're not righteous or unrighteous. They are a million different things.
I'm around 6'4' and 240 pounds. So I rarely feel that intimidated by other men. But I've got to give it up to Terry Bradshaw. That guy is a complete bulldog.
I got the 'Stranger Things' script, like, a week before NBC canceled 'State of Affairs.' I really had this moment where I'm like, 'I'm done.' My neuroses is very sophisticated: I was like, 'I am done. Hollywood is done with David Harbour. They are finished.'
Myself, I suffer from loneliness. And I think we all feel alone. I'm looking for stories that help people deal with loneliness and help them if they are monsters: they don't have to undertake monstrous actions. And maybe they're not monsters.
I loved 'True Detective' so much in Season 1, and then when the Season 2 monstrosity came around, I was like, 'What is this show? What have you done to this show?'
I feel, in storytelling, people are so afraid that you won't get it unless you pound them over the head.
I can like Jack Nicolson's Joker, and I can like Heath Ledger's Joker. There's other Jokers I don't have to like.
I'm terrified of the unknown, which is a driving force for me. I like this idea that the things that terrify us also draw us in.
Sometimes I feel like, those superheroes, if you threw a cookie at them, they would be more terrified than the villain because they might have to eat a carbohydrate.
I was very resistant to my intellectualism for a while. I do start with an intellectual idea for a character. A lot of the times, it'll be the opposite of what I feel like is on the page, or it'll be just an idea that I read in a psychology textbook or in a philosophy book. I'll apply something to it that I can start to tinker with.
I want to bring love handles and eating sandwiches back.
Untangling Christmas lights is the true tragedy of 'Stranger Things.'
I don't associate success with happiness, and I don't take it to heart, like, 'Oh, I'm so special.'
I've always been passionate about the stories I want to tell.
I feel like the most human among us are the weirdest among us. Those voices can be the most creative and the most special. You look around at your parents, your friends, your aunts and uncles, and you realize nobody is normal.
If you are misunderstood, I want you to know that I feel the same way.
One of my impulses in acting has always to make people feel less alone.
Social media should be more like a cocktail party than anything else. You can have your fun jokes, and you can also express yourself and your beliefs. It's a conversation, not a sledgehammer.
The fact that I got famous and became a sex symbol around my normal, frumpy, love-handled self is so gratifying - and, dare I say, culturally gratifying as well.
I was sober for, like, a year and a half, and I was 25, and I actually did have a manic episode, and I was diagnosed as bipolar.
Life really is too short.
I do feel like anything benefits from character logic. That can be from the dumbest ad to the greatest Shakespearean drama to the silliest 'Saturday Night Live' sketch. There is a certain specificity in detail, which you can get when you're paying attention to stuff like that.
A lot of the characters I gravitate towards feel like outsiders.
All I've ever wanted to do as an actor was move people.
The mythos of superheroes is our mythos today. They are American myths. 'Captain America,' 'Iron Man,' 'Hulk' - these are the biggest movies in the world. But sometimes, superhero movies can be a little bit thin.
We are united in that we are all human beings, and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting, and mysterious ride that is being alive.
The perils of success at a young age is being afraid to make a mistake.
I did a movie with Jamie Foxx that was kind of action, and, you know, Jim Hopper's a little bit action; he does throw a good punch.
There is a lot of good television out there, stuff that is better for you than 'Stranger Things,' that, critically, people would be like, 'This is an important show,' but I would press you to find a show that's more watchable. That's hard to do.
If I was in high school, and we had Twitter, and Harrison Ford was on Twitter, I totally would have tweeted him and asked for him to take my high school photos with me.
All the work I do is personal, so the good stuff and the bad stuff that you see in there is all good stuff and bad stuff that I have, and part of the journey, for me, has been to embrace these things that I find embarrassing about myself: my stubbornness, my ego, my maudlin-ness - these things that I see myself do, and I go, 'Oh, David, stop that!'
I feel like Shakespeare is so epic, in a way that sci-fi genre stuff is epic, it transcends the mundane, and it takes you to this place of real passion and real beauty.
What I'm dealing with in 'Hellboy' is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. It's very Shakespearean. It's demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who's trapped in horrible circumstances who's just trying to be a good guy.
I have one thing to say about the mental asylum. I've romanticized two things in my life, and both have fallen short. One is being in a mental asylum. Really, really not as fun as you think it is.
I'm just trying to give the best human expression that I can to any particular genre, which could be comedy, could be drama, could be horror, could be thriller.
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 society's law.
One of the things about having played a lot of villains is... I don't 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.
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 don't 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. We're 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 am a dude who is meant to be on a couch in New York City thumbing through magazines.
I'm terrified of the ocean. I think it's beautiful and magical, but I never go in. That deep, dark water, with no understanding of what goes on behind it - I think that's a metaphor for a lot of things.
People who are deep thinkers, who have sort of a weird way of looking at the universe, are wildly attractive to me.
One of the things I've been interested in my whole career is exploring masculinity and what it means to be a man. The sensitivity of a man, but also the violence and power that goes along with it.
The interesting thing about my career is for years I was trying to do that thing of getting in shape and looking cool - I would look at myself in camera angles and think how my chin looked the best and all this stuff. And I really couldn't get that much work.
When you push and pull heavy things, your body thinks it's going to die, and so it's like, 'I better get bigger, in case we do that tomorrow.'
If you want to really get in shape and get strong, there's these things called 'sleds.' You take a weighted sled, and you just push it across the floor, and then you drag it back. And, basically, if you do that for 20 minutes a day, you'll look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you put enough weight on it, it's the hardest thing in the world.
I was diagnosed as bipolar.
