20 / Q David Harbour

The Stranger Things Breakout Goes Deep on Mental Illness, Addiction, Death Threats and Other Stops on the Road to Hellboy— His First (and Certainly Not Last) Stint A S A Mainstream Leading Man

- Michael Tedder

Q1: You have been on five episodes of Law & Order. Did you ever get to a point where you thought, Really? Another one?

HARBOUR: Wait, let me count: I ’ve been on two normal Law & Orders, two Criminal Intents and one SVU. I call it the Dick Wolf Subsidy for the Theater Arts in New York City, because it’s the job everyone gets when they’re doing an off- Broadway play and making $270 a week. There’s no way you can pay rent on a Manhattan apartment with that kind of paycheck, yet it’s a prestigious, wonderful job, so you need to do a Law & Order every year to supplement your income. And the funny thing is, big stars who I love recognize me from Law & Order more than a nything else. I remember Sarah Silverman grabbing me and being like, “Law & Order!” And even when I showed up to work on Stranger Things, Winona Ryder’s big thing was my silver-thief character from a Criminal Intent episode. So yeah, there was a certain David Harbour cult following in the Hollywood community around my work on Law & Order.

Q2: When did you first know you wanted to be an actor?

HARBOUR: When I was five years old I played the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, and I loved it. I was a big hambone. Then when I got into high school I really wanted to act, but I had no examples of people who did that. I grew up in Westchester, New York, which was a lot of businesspeople, lawyers, doctors — a very upper-middle-class community. There were no examples of a working actor, so I didn’t think it was possible. I went to college and tried to study some other things, but then when I got to New York I realized, right out of college, that I just had to do it. And so I waited tables.