Preparing to play a suburban schlub in HBO’s “DTF St. Louis,” David Harbour decided he needed to transform — slightly.
“I guess it’s just part of my process,” he recalls, “because when I looked at it, it wasn’t that much bigger than myself.” He’s referring to the prosthetic belly the production designed so that Harbour, as ASL interpreter Floyd Smernitch, could believably be Midwestern-dad pudgy. Harbour is hardly willowy — on “Stranger Things,” where he played heroic small-town police chief Jim Hopper for five seasons, his weight fluctuated, and sitting before me, he cuts an imposing figure. But Floyd carries himself with a certain dejection, and the belly helped.
“It’s a little bit about the landscape of America,” Harbour says. He has just seen the new revival of “Death of a Salesman,” and recalls that Lee J. Cobb, who originated the role of Willy Loman in 1949, helped to shape the role around his large frame — his Willy complained that he was an unsuccessful salesman because of his weight. “I’m always thinking of the archetype of the American man and the American dream.”
Perhaps the point was allowing Harbour, now 51, to feel different from himself. “I don’t know that it was extremely necessary, but it helped me put on a bit of a mask. I think the facial hair does too — it allows me to liberate the true soul beneath,” Harbour says. (As we sit on the patio of an East Village coffee shop near Harbour’s Manhattan home, the actor is affably scruffy in sweatpants and beat-up sneakers.) “I don’t think I could have danced as fun and as free as I did without that belly.”
And Floyd Smernitch dances plenty. On “DTF St. Louis,” which was a ratings success when it aired this past spring and has placed Harbour in contention for his first Emmy (following two “Stranger Things” nominations), Floyd is the openhearted, sweet-natured third point of a vexed love triangle. Presented at first as a murder mystery, with Floyd as victim and his best friend Clark (Jason Bateman) and wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) as prime suspects, the show uses its flashbacks to excavate longing, angst and deep-seated shame in the American suburbs. (The series takes its name from a fictional app that Clark and Floyd use to seek out dates.) Created by “Patriot” writer Steven Conrad, “DTF St. Louis” is strikingly morose and yearning. But it takes flight when Floyd lets go and dances, which he does with loose-limbed giddiness.
Floyd’s vulnerability in the midst of this psychosexual maelstrom provides the show’s creative spark. Building the character for Harbour after being brought in deep in the development process, Conrad “threw everything at David,” the writer-director says. “Floyd is so immensely tender and generous, but he’s going down a dark road. You’ve got to be a certain kind of smart to be hurt as deeply as Floyd is hurt — he’s got to play Floyd with this emotional intelligence, but he has to be a teddy bear.”
This complexity of tone, as well as changing his appearance, was welcome for an actor who is globally famous for playing the stern but loving den father to a group of children as they battle supernatural forces. By the time “Stranger Things” ended, Harbour was ready to walk away. “At a certain point,” he says, “you kind of run out of story. We had gone as far with these characters as we could, and we were starting to, in a subtle way, repeat beats.” He’d already spent years developing “DTF St. Louis” as a potential next act. “I’m not so worried about maintaining an identity in the industry,” he says, “but of course it’s on your mind that you have an opportunity. What’s the coolest thing I could make?”
“DTF St. Louis” represents a return, bringing the actor back to the detailed character work he was doing before the Upside Down took over the planet, and a step in a new direction. Harbour’s been working for decades, but he’s never had a part this meaty.
It also reframes the conversation around Harbour. The actor’s long track record of disappearing into character first got swallowed up by unexpected superstardom, then got overshadowed amid a media furor around his alleged conduct on the “Stranger Things” set and in his private life. By the time “DTF St. Louis” was close to being unveiled, Harbour’s image had changed once again — this time, against his will. In October 2025, a month before “Stranger Things” started airing its final season, Harbour’s ex-wife, Lily Allen, released the excoriating album “West End Girl.” A moment that should have been a victory lap became, for an actor who’s long been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder, a frightening mental health emergency. Months later, Harbour is reemerging in the public eye; he’s ready to talk about it all.
Getting to that point took some doing, in part because attention, for Harbour, has proven to come with a bitter edge. Prior to their breakup, Allen and Harbour had been a supercouple parasocially adored for their quirks: Harbour appeared to be the smiley, wry actor from the internet’s favorite show, while Allen was the edgy yet lovable singer whose charm lay in her deftness with words. Their 2023 Architectural Digest video touring their Brooklyn townhouse — from the brief period Harbour left Manhattan, where he lived before and has since — has more than 9 million views. The couple, who wed in 2020 in Las Vegas, seemed like a package deal, and fans loved the pairing, or what they thought they knew about it.
Which meant “West End Girl” landed like a grenade. While Allen has said the album uses “artistic license” and noted in an interview, “I don’t think I could say it’s all true,” lyrics about extramarital activity, violations of an agreed-upon arrangement and emotional manipulation set the internet ablaze. (Her case was that an unnamed husband, envious of her newfound success in acting and chafing against the binds of marriage, demeaned her and kept a separate apartment — the “Pussy Palace” — for sexual encounters that went beyond the no-strings-attached flings she’d allowed.) Perhaps the kindest track on the album is the final one, in which Allen finally takes stock of her own role in the marriage’s dissolution — and even this relatively evenhanded song concludes, “It’s not me, it’s you / And there was nothing I could do.”
“It was weird,” Harbour says now in his first public comments about the album. “I do believe that it is the privilege of every artist to use their experience to create art, and so I respect her for doing that.” Allen has for her entire career drawn on the details of her life and the lives of loved ones. (Her 2006 debut record features “Alfie,” a song casting her brother, future “Game of Thrones” actor Alfie Allen, as an aimless pot smoker.) Harbour, who wasn’t a name actor until “Stranger Things” blew up, has firmer boundaries. “I can’t really say that much more,” he says, “because it’s my private life. In spite of the fact that a lot of people don’t allow me a private life — I value it. And I also value the lives of the people that I interact with privately. I just won’t speak about that.”
The door is open, I say, for him to push back against any claims Allen has made. He won’t do that, but he has one more thought to share. “Stories are complex,” he says, “and that’s why I say I respect her creation of art to channel her experience. It wasn’t my experience.” Besides, he’s no stranger to the transformation of life into art. “My ability to use my experience comes through in the creation of ‘DTF,’” he says. Floyd just wants to feel loved and as if he has the capacity to share love. Harbour, putting out into the world a show of uncommon delicacy, can relate. “I want to make things that make people feel safer. My particular talent is in allowing people to feel like they’re not alone.”
This was a gift Harbour discovered early. Growing up in plummy Westchester County in the 1980s and early 1990s with parents who worked in real estate, he was a complicated kid. “I did have a lot of suppressed emotion, and confused feelings about the world,” he says. In high school, Harbour learned about the concept of subtext — that people sometimes say one thing, but do another. Playing out this irony onstage in school productions, Harbour was rewarded with laughter and applause. “I was like, ‘So this is the place where I can unlock the weirdest, most wonderful thing in the world, which is the human psyche.’”
After graduating from Dartmouth — and spending his summers doing regional theater in Maine — Harbour plunged into life on the professional stage. “I didn’t really want to go to college,” he says. “I wanted to drop out and become an actor. But I was in a community where it was inconceivable that I would be an actor.” His voice takes on a sarcastic edge. “Being a lawyer was what I was going to do with my dramatic talents.”
While trying to make a go of it as a New York theater actor, Harbour stopped drinking. “I couldn’t get work — I looked like shit, and I couldn’t show up to auditions. I was just a mess. Then I got sober, and a week later, I got on a soap opera — my first paying gig. It was sort of a sign: Make your choice.” Work picked up, and Harbour began building a career, often playing a supporting character who helps reveal the hypocrisies or delusions of the protagonists. He received a 2005 Tony nomination for playing Nick in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” the ultimate theatrical exploration of verbal and emotional games within marriage. In “Brokeback Mountain,” he slyly picks up Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jack Twist, in the midst of Jack’s halfhearted attempt to play it straight, with an offer to go fishing together; in “Revolutionary Road,” he’s the neighbor who sorrowfully witnesses Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Kate Winslet’s characters slowly drive themselves mad.
“DTF St. Louis,” which began as an adaptation of a 2017 New Yorker article about an upstate New York murder trial before, in a lengthy development process, becoming an entirely new story, allowed Harbour to dig deeper into the things we think but cannot say. The characters are stripped of any pretense, and come to seem shockingly guileless in their interactions with one another as they make painfully uncool stabs at connection. “It’s like watching a bunch of adult virgins walking around, saying and doing cringey things,” Bateman tells me, “because they don’t know how to be full of shit like most of us teach ourselves how to do.” Harbour’s ability to access vulnerability set the tone for the shoot, Bateman says: “He’s got this huge heart, and you can see in his eyes his ability to be soft and human. He’s one of those people — I hope I’m the same — where we trust people until they give us a reason not to.”
Despite the crime-story framing, the series’ endgame reveals that Floyd and Clark are as tender as the actors playing them. Throughout “DTF St. Louis,” the idea of returning to a childlike state keeps surfacing, including in sequences where Bateman’s and Harbour’s characters sit side by side on a swing set. The series’ ending depicts the impact Floyd made: Carol and Clark both genuinely loved him, even as Floyd’s inner monologue reminded him constantly of his sexual shame and self-loathing. “It doesn’t matter what my intentions are, how hard I work,” Harbour says, describing Floyd’s mindset. “At the end of the day, I’m fat, people think I’m disgusting and I ruin things with my desire.”
Loving relationships are not without their complexity on “Stranger Things” too, as Harbour saw nuance in Hopper’s relationship with Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven — an ultrapowerful being, in the form of a child, whom the police chief must protect. “It’s like trying to heal shared trauma, which my therapist would say that we’re trying to do all the time, whether we acknowledge it or not,” he says. “Those two are perfect interlocking puzzle pieces.”
In the series finale, which premiered on New Year’s Eve as a stand-alone episode, Eleven sacrifices herself to save the world. Her friends, bereft, spin theories that she may somehow have survived, even though she’s disappeared. Harbour, who’d begun to find “Stranger Things” repetitive, loves that Eleven dies at the end. “A lot of people think maybe she’s in Spain or whatever,” he says. “But right from the very beginning of that series — we love this little girl, but you really can’t have a little girl in Hawkins, Indiana, with supernatural powers running around. She just cannot exist.” For life within the show to truly return to its status quo, all otherworldly aspects must go away. “Right from the beginning of the series — you gotta kill her.” It seems clear, I say, that Harbour feels no ambiguity about Eleven’s fate; he agrees. “Until Netflix needs to raise their subscription rate. Then — ladies and gentlemen: ‘Eleven,’ the new series!”
Conversations about “Stranger Things” feel lighthearted now, but as the show ended, Harbour’s public image took a beating. Around the December holidays, reports of his odd behavior in public alarming passersby in San Diego circulated on Reddit and in the tabloids, and he skipped celebrations for the “Stranger Things” finale. I broach the subject, asking if Harbour had needed a tune-up or some time away, before he cuts off my euphemisms with bracing candor. “I had a breakdown,” Harbour says, then punctuates the sentence with a big laugh. “I do suffer from some confusing stuff — it’s confusing as hell. I think a lot of people have a friend or a brother or a co-worker that deals with mental health stuff, and they’re probably pretty confused when that person gets depressed or gets manic or has an episode.”
Harbour feels concern for fans who don’t know what’s going on with him — he wishes he could understand it himself. But he’s also tired of the way public discussions about mental health play out. “There’s a lot of irresponsible nonsense going on out there,” he says of the conversation around him and people like him, before citing the Scottish disability-awareness campaigner John Davidson, who interrupted this year’s BAFTA Awards by yelling racial slurs. “That poor guy with Tourette’s and that unfortunate situation — we’re either going to acknowledge that mental illness is a thing or we’re not. We can stone everyone to death if you want!
“Under times of extreme stress, that can cause somewhat erratic behavior, and it’s embarrassing, and I’m ashamed of it. It’s not something I choose, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I do feel like, for some of us, our gifts are inextricably linked with our illnesses. To have a nervous system that reacts to the world in a too-delicate way can allow me to have that moment that I love on the swings with Jason. But it can also force me, in moments of extreme stress, to act a little weird.”
The stress that Harbour says triggered him also includes what he calls false reporting. A week after the release of “West End Girl,” the Daily Mail published a report that Brown, Harbour’s scene partner since her childhood, had “filed a harassment and bullying claim” against him before production on the final “Stranger Things” season began. (Brown later told a reporter, “Of course I felt safe. I mean, we’ve worked together for 10 years.”)
Harbour expresses bewilderment, calling the timing of the story “a weird thing” and saying it “came out in a weird way.” (“Weird” is a word to which he seems to default when unsure of what to say, or when stopping himself from saying something sharper.) Openness and a deep well of emotion, valuable traits for an actor, may not equip him to wage PR warfare as conducted in the social media age. “Straight up, Millie and I are working on several …” He stops himself from revealing their plans. “You’ll see more of me and Millie — 10 years wasn’t enough. There is a special bond there. I love her. She loves me.”
“Obviously I changed so much from Season 1 to Season 5, and David was there through all of it,” Brown tells Variety by email. “Over time, our relationship became much more collaborative creatively. When you work with someone for that many years, we could really push each other emotionally in scenes. Even though the series has ended, there’s still a lot of gratitude. Getting to share that experience with him for so many years is something I’ll always remember and value.”
Harbour wants to explain his side of a tabloid story that impugns not just his relationship with a colleague, but his professionalism. But he’s hesitant: “In this weird world we live in where sound bites will be created, I’m trying to figure out how to say this.” He’s speaking slowly, and in a grave tone. “It’s a show that went on for 10 years. We worked together for 10 years during her formative teenage years, playing father and daughter. I don’t know if people have families and friends that you spend a lot of time with for 10 years — you occasionally get in arguments, disagreements.” But the comparison only goes so far, which Harbour acknowledges. “In families, it’s OK because you’re just in a disagreement and then you come back together. The problem with a billion-dollar show is that there’s just hundreds of people who want to get involved.”
From his perspective, whatever happened was easily resolved — but working on a megahit can make matters more vexed. “It’s simple,” he says. “It was just a simple rupture-and-repair thing that, once we cleared everybody out of the way and talked to each other, we’re fine. Everyone nowadays is very scared of talking about things. People are very scared of being human. It’s unfortunate, because I don’t know how to navigate this weird media world. But it was completely normal, and we adore each other and always have.”
Unlike his child co-stars — who rocketed to fame on their first major gig — Harbour had an acute awareness of how people’s perceptions of him changed. The weekend that “Stranger Things” first dropped on Netflix, he went into the coffee shop where he’d been going ever since he moved to the East Village. “The people that had served me there for nine years,” he recalls, “were like, ‘Can I get your autograph?’”
The show transformed Harbour into something new — even as he was still the same actor. There were perks: After Donald Trump was elected to his first term, Harbour gave a rousing acceptance speech on behalf of his cast at the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards. “Stranger Things” had won the prize for best ensemble, and Harbour made the case for the show as a piece of #Resistance art. (“We 1983 Midwesterners will repel bullies!” Harbour bellowed as co-star Winona Ryder, by his side, made an expression of amazement that turned into a meme. “We will shelter freaks and outcasts, those who have no home!”)
The ride was fun at first. “You get free ice cream, or you get Knicks tickets, things like that,” he says. “I love that aspect of it. But after the first six months, the sheen of that recognition starts to wear off a little bit.” The work, which moved more people than Harbour ever dreamed of reaching, came with a gradual loss of his personhood. “I love affecting people, touching people, bringing people joy — all that stuff is the reason you do it. And then what you have to deal with is the fact that you actually are just an object to people,” he says. “You can be an object of joy, or you can be like, ‘I hate that guy.’ And then you’re an object of frustration.”
Harbour’s feeling better now, and trying his best to move beyond all the weirdness: “You can like me, not like me, yell about me — whatever I mean to you. But I’m just going to try to put the best foot forward, and try to put out things, in the midst of all of my difficulties.”
Making art has helped spur him toward reflection too; “West End Girl” was a burn-it-down catharsis for Harbour’s ex, but the actor works in a different emotional register. He tells me an anecdote about a friend, a Buddhist monk practicing his faith outside San Diego, who had to learn to be at peace in himself before his superiors would allow him to work for peace in the world beyond the monastery walls. Harbour can relate: For him, the best work happens when he’s able to step outside the chaos of the everyday. “To me, art has a quality of gratitude in it,” he says, “where we are able to see the dramas — and also to have the moments where you go, Oh, yeah — it’s beautiful to be alive and to be able to sit on a swing set with another guy.”
There’s that evocation of childhood again — one that comes naturally for Harbour. (He’s something of a big kid himself: When he laughs, it’s booming and boisterous, and when he gets excited about something, I see that his rollicking SAG Awards performance wasn’t an act.) At another moment, Harbour cites a line from “DTF St. Louis” about how one of the pains of adulthood is that one doesn’t get to go out for recess anymore. The series, he says, “feels like two kids at recess playing freeze tag. Being in the unknown with another person, and trusting that the person has your back and is not going to humiliate you — that is magical.”
To preserve their on-screen camaraderie, Harbour and Bateman kept to themselves on set. “When you feel that chemistry, you don’t want to mess with it,” Harbour says. “You don’t want to hang out too much and have lunch too much and talk about it too much. You kind of want to keep it the treasure that it is.” Sets, in Harbour’s view, have grown too busy: “Nowadays, people are really interested in BTS — there’s a lot of people on set making TikToks. Whether you think I’m a weirdo or Jason’s a weirdo for just being quiet, I understand that much better than I understand the bubbliness of a set. We’re trying to capture the moment, and it can be very delicate and fragile, and it can be broken by too much casualness.”
The feeling of access that behind-the-scenes footage lends can make viewers feel as though they know what’s going on — but if there’s one thing Harbour has learned from both “Stranger Things” fame and “West End Girl” scandal, it’s that playing a character in real life is no fun. “I tend to value and understand the nature of privacy,” he says, “and the nature of real friendship.”
As “Stranger Things” recedes from view, and as he’s able to move past a challenging year, Harbour is experiencing a burst of productivity in his career. He recently shot Courteney Cox’s directorial debut, “Evil Genius,” where he stars opposite Patricia Arquette as a conspirator in a real-life bombing spree. And December brings action-comedy sequel “Violent Night 2,” which, like its 2022 predecessor, casts Harbour as a murderous St. Nick, doling out carnage to those who’ve been naughty. Kristen Bell, joining the franchise as Mrs. Claus (“But perhaps a slightly different version than we’ve seen before,” she says), tells me that Harbour immerses himself in work even (or especially) when playing outlandish material. “I find David to be very present and very tender,” she says. “He’s bringing this huge presence, but there is a porousness to it. He wants to interact. He’s not trying to pull off a solo endeavor. He’s trying to make a world.”
That month will also bring a real test, though more for the industry than for Harbour: “Avengers: Doomsday,” the Christmas-release megasequel that represents Marvel’s first theatrical outing since last year’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” With Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. returning to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the latter taking on the new role of villainous Doctor Doom), the film is a Hail Mary attempt to bring a franchise, one that’s diminished since 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” back to its past glory. Having appeared as Red Guardian in MCU entries “Black Widow” (2021) and “Thunderbolts” (2025), Harbour is among the new kids on set.
Harbour and Florence Pugh, shooting together, witnessed a mythical Marvel sequence — “the moment when said character does said thing that you’ve seen before,” he says. (Harbour will not divulge, but I’m guessing Thor will catch his hammer in this film.) “We were just pinching ourselves that we get a front-row seat to this process.”
A reason why Harbour doesn’t like to shoot the shit on set is that it’s a distraction from what he’s so excited to do. “I feel like a dog at a dog run when I’m doing it, you know?” he says. “And when I’m outside of it, I just kind of wander around, and do my laundry occasionally.”
Another distraction: this interview. Harbour isn’t withholding in conversation, exactly, but he’s made clear, to a degree unusual for an actor doing press, that talking about his work is far less important to him than doing it. At the end of our time together, Harbour cites Philip Seymour Hoffman’s reticence to speak with journalists: “He just wanted you to see him as a character.” But Harbour’s complicated past year presents one particular conundrum: Perhaps whether he speaks out about it or doesn’t, some portion of the audience will come to a David Harbour performance with preconceptions about the person giving the performance. Does it matter how hard you work to disappear on-screen if some subset of the audience believes they know the man behind the mask?
“The challenge, and my hope, is that I just do such a fucking good job that you — even if you hate me or you love me — you lose yourself in that moment and you go, ‘I’m watching Floyd,’” Harbour says. “That’s all I really ever want to do. It forces me to try to be earnest in my intent.”
Even now, he’s still learning the media ropes, and is speaking haltingly, aware that what he’s saying might look like false modesty. But there’s nothing he can do about that — all he can do, like Floyd or Jim Hopper or like an actor struggling to make himself heard over the noise, is attempt to be open, even in a world where that quality is rarely rewarded. “I’m not trying to make myself look good or look heroic,” he continues, that booming voice lowering slightly. “I’m just trying to tell you a story that I feel like might be valuable.”