It’s really good to be David Harbour right now, right? He went from being rejected as The Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine for being “too fat” to starring in a hit Netflix TV series (Stranger Things), and is now going one step further and nabbing the title role in the new Hellboy franchise. So how is the actor coping with this rapid-fire success? Quite well, it seems. Harbour expressed his enthusiasm for Hellboy at a recent press event for Stranger Things (via Screenrant)…
“We start shooting in a couple of weeks. I go to Bulgaria in August, late August, end of August and then we start shooting I think in mid-September. And I’ve seen, we’ve done makeup tests and everything. And it looks really great. And the monsters and everything about it looks really special. I can’t. Everything is top secret at this point, but it’s beautiful and beyond my expectations. And I was very nervous going in that it would be not what I expected. I’m excited about it. I’m very excited about it.”
Harbour also weighed in on some key differences between his Stranger Things character Jim Hopper and Hellboy…
“And yeah, Hellboy is his own thing and I really like him. I’m starting to fall in love with him. He’s got a lot of issues. Hopper is a bit more of an adult than Hellboy. Hopper is kind of a child in certain ways, but I think Hellboy is really a hellboy and not a hellman and he’s struggling with his own destiny, this horrible destiny of being the Beast of the Apocalypse and not wanting to do that and be a sweet guy inside and having tons of father issues. Like, the fact that he’s an adoptee in General Brooms, the fact that he was spawned by these Nazi Occultants are all things that he himself takes on and feels guilty about. He smokes cigarettes and he hates himself and I think he has a really good heart and he’s a sweet kid and he’s trying to figure out all of these father/mother issues and I think we’ll see that expressed in the movie as well. So it’s complicated and it’s really beautiful and exciting to start to work on. There’s a lot to draw there and a lot of complexity that to me, I don’t know we always get to see in severe movies. It’s very much a character piece. Our model for it is Shakespeare. I mean, it’s very much like Hamlet in a certain way. So it’s exciting to play as an actor.”
Hamlet, eh? That’s very different, and could definitely work. Hellboy certainly seems the type to mope around having existential crises. When he’s not fighting demons, of course…
News regarding the film is ramping up with Ian McShane just being added to the cast as Professor Broom. The reboot promises to have a different tone than the previous franchise: Millennium and Lionsgate have teased that the film will be much darker, and gruesome than previous Hellboy films.
… You can find Jordan on Twitter (@JordJJones), and Facebook.
Originally published August 3, 2017. Updated December 17, 2019.
