His 'Stranger Things' breakout and hard 'Hellboy' lessons

For David Harbour, it’s all about perspective. The 47-year-old actor is among the rare species in Hollywood — right up there with Bryan Cranston and Jon Hamm — who reached mainstream fame at a relatively “old” age thanks to an excessively buzzy television series.

In Harbour’s case, it came with his instantly beloved post-40 role as grizzled police chief Jim Hopper when Netflix’s sci-fi streaming phenomenon Stranger Things popped off in 2016. Up until that point, Harbour had been a self-described character actor. But what many people don’t realize is the White Plains, N.Y. native had under-the-radar (or discarded) roles in a host of major productions you probably saw well before you knew the name David Harbour. Like many actors, he started on stage (Broadway’s The Rainmaker), soaps (As the World Turns) and procedurals (as four different characters in the Law & Order universe!), but he also had a scene cut from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005), turned up for a vital sequence in Brokeback Mountain (2005), got his Bond on in Quantum of Solace (2008), drew recognition for stealing scenes from Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road (2008) and appeared in the superhero movies The Green Hornet (2011) and Suicide Squad (2016) long before his post-Hopper hot mess Hellboy (2019) and subsequent palette cleanser Black Widow (2021). “It's given me a well leveled perspective in terms of external success being almost independent of your particular love of whatever you're doing,” Harbour tells us about his late-career surge in a new Role Recall interview. “One of the things that's always guided me is just whatever level I can do it on. I just love [acting] and I love it so much that I'm willing to fly here, fly there, sacrifice my weight, my sanity, all these things, just ‘cause I love this thing. And it doesn't matter if it's on the biggest show in the world or in just a community theater production that 50 people are gonna see. For me it's just the pure love of the thing. And I think that’s why it's great to have success.”