In addition to drawing a new batch of fans as small-town cop Jim Hopper, David Harbour will be seen on big screens next year as the new incarnation of Hellboy, as created by Mike Mignola. Talking with Vanity Fair, he explained his and the new movie's approach.
Directed by Neil Marshall, the new Hellboy will find the titular antihero doing battle with a new threat called Nimue, also known as the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich). And according to Harbour, he knows how he sees his character. "It’s a classically complicated hero. He’s a creature that was meant to bring about the end of the world, and he just sort of wants to be a good guy," he tells the magazine. "He’s got that complexity to him. He’s also a monster who lives among human beings, so he’s in a sense fighting for human beings against his fellow monsters, and yet the humans hate him because they fear him and they think he’s weird looking and everything."
"He has a heart that’s really good and with a lot of this crusted-over stuff. What I’m dealing with in Hellboy is a lot different, bigger in a certain way," Harbour adds. "It’s very Shakespearean. It’s demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who’s trapped in horrible circumstances who’s just trying to be a good guy."
The new Hellboy will be out on 11 January next year. As for Stranger Things, we now know that Season 3 won't premiere until next summer, but Harbour is typically circumspect when addressing what we can expect. "I think we do some even weirder stuff in Season 3. I think it’s always about pushing the envelope. In terms of Hopper, all the things that we’ve had from Season 1 and Season 2 come to a boiling point for him in the beginning of Season 3. It’s really interesting to watch, because we’ve sort of cleared up the main problem. You see in the end of Season 2 that the Upside Down is still kind of there, but we really sort of solved it. We closed the gate. So, this is a year for Hopper of real domesticity. Eleven’s been validated, she has a birth certificate. She’s a part of the world in some way."
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