The Strangest Thing

David Harbour was a workingman’s actor growing disillusioned with Hollywood when a script about a bunch of kids in the US Midwest battling supernatural forces fell into his lap... and everything changed.

- Mitch Moxley

Last January, as protesters stormed airports around the country to rally against the White House–issued travel ban, David Harbour delivered an impassioned speech during the SAG Awards in Los Angeles. The cast of the sleeper Netflix hit, Stranger Things, was onstage accepting the award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series. It was just days after the ban took effect, and Harbour felt that attending an awards show was kind of frivolous, all things considered. After co-star Winona Ryder handed him the bulky statue, Harbour, who plays troubled small-town police chief Jim Hopper in the show, took the mic.

“In light of all that’s going on in the world today, it’s difficult to celebrate the already celebrated Stranger Things,” Harbour said, his voice forceful. “But, this award from you, who take your craft seriously and earnestly believe, like me, that great acting can change the world, is a call to arms from our fellow craftsmen and women to go deeper, and through our art to battle against fear, selfcentredness and exclusivity...by revealing intimate truths that serve as a forceful reminder to folks that when they feel broken and afraid and tired, they are not alone. We are united in that we are all human beings and we are all together on this horrible, painful, joyous, exciting and mysterious ride that is being alive.”

The audience stood and roared, and in the days that followed, the speech went viral—viewed over two million times on YouTube. It wasn’t political, Harbour insists, but instead a cultural plea. He was asking his peers: What kinds of stories do we want to tell? What kind of world do we want to reflect on-screen? “If we can make little ripples in the pond in certain directions,” Harbour says. “Maybe those ripples can somehow affect social change.”