An actor whose body has evolved into a character just as much as the parts he plays has an almost poetic quality. The majority of the world knows David Harbor as the tough, kind Sheriff Hopper from “Stranger Things”, but he has spent the better part of ten years undergoing drastic physical changes, each more difficult than the last. As you watch it happen, you begin to wonder if the body-for-the-role approach has a cost that doesn’t always appear in the final cut.
If you look back, it most likely began around the time of the “Black Widow” shoot. Harbor had already gained weight for “Stranger Things”, but he added even more for his Marvel role as Alexei Shostakov, a Russian soldier. He told the “New York Times” that he was eating more purposefully and accepting his size, reaching about 280 pounds.
He said, “I loved it” there’s a certain honesty in that. Around that time, he met Lily Allen, his current wife showed up for their first date at the Wolseley in London with a large beard and what he cheerfully described as his physical worst. He obviously found some significance in the fact that she still fell in love with him.
The whiplash followed. Harbor had to lose about 80 pounds in eight months in order to play Hopper, a gaunt, tortured prisoner in a Russian labor camp, for “Stranger Things” Season 4. He and trainer David Higgins devised a strategy centered on Pilates and intermittent fasting, enduring what he later called a “difficult and exciting ride”.
He had dropped to about 190 pounds by the time the cameras rolled, which must have felt almost unnatural at the time. On screen, the change was dramatic. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again” is how Harbor expressed his feelings off it.
That wasn’t exactly what he did. Harbor gained the weight back almost immediately after finishing “Stranger Things” to play Santa Claus in “Violent Night” a decision that makes perfect sense when you give it a second thought.
Then came the arduous, slow descent back to a manageable weight for Season 5. He acknowledged in an Instagram post, “All this up and down is not good for the body”, with a candor you don’t often see from actors discussing physical transformation. It’s still unclear if he’ll ever reach a stable baseline or if the roles will continue to be challenging.
This is further complicated by his most recent project. Harbor portrays Floyd in HBO’s “DTF St. Louis”, a man in a love triangle who struggles and feels self-conscious and uses food as a sort of emotional buffer. Instead of bulking up again for the part, the production fitted him with a 30-pound latex prosthetic belly that resembled a vest.
It had to be applied every morning using spirit gum and peeled off at the end of a 14-hour shoot day, leaving him “all sweaty” as Harbor described it. The irony that the prosthetic was probably unnecessary at all seemed to almost amuse him. “I could have really just bulked up a little bit more”, he said, “and I think I would have been fine”.
That admission has some merit. At fifty, Harbor seems to be beginning to consider the boundaries of using his body as a creative tool. He has repeatedly stated that the prosthetics are simply too good to warrant the physical strain. After the “Stranger Things” Season 4 ordeal, he told British GQ, “Never again”. Although he has since retracted that statement, there is truth to the statement. The yo-yo strategy may be effective on screen, but it’s more difficult to sell when you’re the one changing all the time inside your body.
Interestingly, Lily Allen seems to have “mixed feelings” about her husband’s slimmer form despite everything. With evident warmth, Harbor presented this to the “New York Times” as a covert compliment. The person closest to him seems most at ease with the raw original despite all the discipline and sacrifice that went into the changes.