Having been a central character throughout the first three seasons of Stranger Things, we may think we know everything there is to know about Jim Hopper (David Harbour), but that’s not the case. Apparently, creators Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as Harbour, have kept a “huge” secret about the Hawkins chief of police hidden for five years. And apparently it’s something Harbour has known about from the start.
Stranger Things season 4 is still in production, but we know that the season will be much darker and more intense than its predecessors, and that it sets up a “definite end for the series.” Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Harbour said what he could about it. “There’s one thing in it that plays very big in this season that I’ve known since the first frame of the first season,” he said. “Me and the Duffers would sit around and speculate, ‘Oh, wouldn’t this be cool?’ the minute we started shooting. We never thought we’d even get a second season, and then we get to do it in this season.”
"It’s so satisfying to have had an idea five years prior, and to go like, ‘Oh, this is a season when we’re gonna let out this secret that we were using just as a subtle thing to inform something.’ We’re gonna lay it out finally, and it’s really cool."
Better late than never.
Stranger Things 4 will will show us Hopper “at his most vulnerable”
Harbour also said that season 4 will show us a different side to his character. “We get to see a lot of Hopper at his most vulnerable, we’re gonna reveal a lot of backstory points that we’ve only hinted at in boxes in his attic,” he says. “We’re gonna see a lot of these different threads, and also, we get to see a rebirth of him.”
It sounds like we’re really going to get a dive into Hopper in the next season. An early teaser released last year showed him being held prisoner in Russia. How he got there will take some explaining of its own.
Stranger Things season 4 still has no release date, but if all goes well will hit Netflix sometime next year! In the meantime, you can see Harbour as Red Guardian in Marvel’s Black Widow movie, which is in theaters and on Disney+ Premier Access right now
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