Sheriff Hopper has “the best storyline” in Stranger Things 4
By Dan Selcke
David Harbour is a little biased, but he thinks that his Stranger Things character, Sheriff Hopper, has “the best storyline” in the show’s upcoming fourth season. Speaking this past weekend at New York Comic Con, he said that the fourth season will go really deep with Hopper. “We start to really uncover these truths that we’ve only hinted at before.”
That’s pretty impressive considering that the character looked like he was dead at the end of season 3, but Netflix made clear that wasn’t the case with a teaser that showed him — somehow — a prisoner in Siberia.
How did that happen? No idea, but he’s going to need to go on quite a journey to get back home. “You have a whole character who is Gandalf the Gray who fights the Balrog, sends it to Hell, and re-emerges as Gandalf the White,” he said, likening Hopper to Gandalf the wizard from The Lord of the Rings. “There’s a rebirth to him this season and a coming to terms with this toxicity that he’s carried around with him. This trauma, really…You’ll get to see a lot more specifically of what those traumas were, which I’ve always wanted to get into. Those are cardboard boxes in the attic: my dad and Vietnam. We got into a lot more layers with him…He has all these twists and turns and also, there’s a tremendous arc of redemption, which plays out in each season. But on a broad scale, you’ll start to see we’re really arching toward the end of this redemption, which, to me, is very beautiful.”
"You’ve seen that there is a Demogorgon in this prison from last season. I think they also talked about Alien 3, the Fincher Alien, where they’re tapped in prison with a monster. This is a Hopper trying to get home to his family element, which is really incredible … A lot of the things that you wanted to [see] in terms of Hopper and where he’s going. I think you’re gonna see more development of the Joyce/Hopper relationship and then you’re gonna see more of the Hopper/Eleven development."
And of course, the new season will have “tremendous action to it — action on a level that we’ve never done before,” all in the service of rounding out the series as a whole. “What we’re trying to do, as we elaborate this thing, [is] to draw it back and make sure that we don’t have an endgame like, some of us thought about, that show Lost… ‘What happened to the polar bear?!'”
"We’re trying to draw in, so the [elements of the storyline] start to come to a head and become a complete piece. Season 4 lays a lot of pipe for that."
It sounds like the show might be gearing up for a big finale in season 5. But no need to think about that yet, particularly when the vibes on set are so good. “I think we all have that relationship where we’ve been [through] so much that when we get on set together, it still feels like day one. It still feels very creative,” he said of his castmates. “The hoopla around us when we step off that stage is insane … but for those kids … what I do like is that they are grounded enough to be [the same] when we are on set working on the show.”
"Everybody loves the show still. We love the creators and we love our characters, and we love each other and we feel like a family. We could have big special effects and all that stuff, but we’d miss that thing that to me is really what the show is about. So that’s very much preserved."
At the beginning, David Harbour worried that Netflix wasn’t promoting Stranger Things enough
Stranger Things is a giant hit now, but there was a time when it was just another Netflix show nobody had ever heard of, and it didn’t seem like the streamer was interested in pushing it. Harbour remembered talking about it to Vampire Diaries star Paul Wesley. “So about two weeks before the show I was like, ‘There’s still no ads, man, like buses and phone, there’s no ads,’ and [Paul] was like, ‘Sorry man, they’re trying to bury it.’ It was clearly a terrible show.”
"I was like, ‘Oh no, man. I blew it. I had like one of the leads on a Netflix show, and I blew it, we all blew it.’"
Of course, the show ended up exploding thanks to word of mouth, which is often how Netflix does things; they didn’t talk up Squid Game either and that’s been a giant hit. “I think one of the things that people love about [Stranger Things], and it’s so hard to have in today’s culture, is you discovered it,” Harbour said. “I mean, like, you didn’t hear much about it, and you just sort of were playing around on Netflix and … people were like, ‘Oh this looks kind of good,’ and there was a sense of discovery about it. That was brilliant.”
"The advertising department claimed later on that that was the manipulation the entire time, and that they’re just geniuses. But, I don’t know what’s true."
However it happened, Stranger Things is one of the decades biggest shows. We’ll get to watch it continue some time in 2022.
Next. Let’s dreamcast a Harry Potter television reboot on HBO Max. dark
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