David Harbour gives timeline for Stranger Things season 4

It’s been nearly two years since the third season of Stranger Things came out on Netflix; at this rate, the kids from Hawkins, Indiana are going to be able to buy beer before we see them again.

The fourth season has been a long time coming both because: 1) It’s a complicated show that takes a long time to produce, and; 2) The pandemic. But according to David Harbour (Sheriff Jim Hopper), he at least is almost done filming his scenes.

“I mean, you’re not supposed to say but I’ll tell you,” Harbour recently told Jimmy Kimmel when asked if he was done shooting the new season. “Yeah, I’m almost done. I’ve got one more, like, little stint. We should be done in, like, August. I gotta shave [my head] again.”

So far as shaving his head goes, Harbour is talking about Hopper’s new look for season 4. Somehow, he ends up in a Soviet prison camp — we have no idea how — and those Soviet barbers shave down to the nub:

Confusion over Stranger Things and Black Widow 

Funnily enough, Harbour’s character from the upcoming Black Widow movie — Red Guardian — starts that film under similar circumstances. “I knew that I was going to be in this Russian prison and then literally a month later I got a call from Marvel that they wanted me to to play a guy who starts out in a Russian prison,” Harbour said. “I was like, this is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what Twitter and Reddit and all those guys do with it. So there’s all these conspiracy theories that, like, you know, Hopper went to Russia and then put on a supersuit and now he’s the Red Guardian in this Black Widow movie.”

He’s probably not wrong about the conspiracy theorists. Anyway, Red Guardian has a big bushy beard and a full head of hair, the idea being that he’s been in prison for a while and it’s run wild. It sounds like Hopper was going to have a similar look for his Siberian labor camp stint, but Harbour was worried it would look too similar. “I kept sending these photos [to Stranger Things showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer],” Harbour said. “And then finally at the end, I had all this hair and all this beard and we planned to do it that way and I was like, guys, we can’t do this. I’m coming out with this Marvel movie. I can’t have the beard and the hair. So we came up with a whole different look for [Hopper]. We had him shave his head and this whole thing.”

Black Widow is coming out on July 9 of this year. As for Stranger Things season 4, if they’re done shooting by August, we probably won’t see the new episodes until 2022, as cast members have suggested before.

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h/t Complex