Your Stranger Things Survival Kit

With season two around the corner, creators Matt and Ross Duffer and star David Harbour reveal the show’s lesser-known influences — and drop a few hints about where it’s headed

- Steve Palopoli

David Harbour’s first days on the Stranger Things set felt like a real-life trip to the Upside Down. He thought the script for the pilot was the best he’d read in 20 years of film and television work, and he was ecstatic when the show’s creators, twins Matt and Ross Duffer, cast him as Jim Hopper, the Chief of Police in the show’s fictional Hawkins, Indiana. But at first, Harbour was a little too much like the neurotic lawman he plays.

I got into shooting and I was like, Oh God, I’m the worst! It’s going to be a nightmare. I’m never going to work again”, says Harbour. “My neurosis going in was that we’d be the first Netflix show to not have a second season.”

Two years later, Stranger Things has 18 Emmy nominations and is one of the most popular shows on the streaming network. And it most definitely does have a second season, premiering October 27. Meanwhile, Harbour’s reward for his breakout work on season one — which earned him one of those Emmy noms — is an even more bonkers story line in this new nine-episode run.

And that’s saying a lot. (Season-one spoilers ahead, in case you spent last year living under a rock.) We’ve already watched Hopper break into a local government facility where operatives perform secret experiments; there, he discovers they’ve opened a portal into an alternate dimension, which fugitive kid Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who has escaped from the same lab, calls the Upside Down. Hopper also helps Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) find her son Will, who has been kidnapped by an Upside Down monster nicknamed the Demogorgon by Will’s ragtag group of Dungeons & Dragons – playing friends.

So yeah, stranger than that.

“Any ball you throw at him, he knocks out of the park”, says Matt Duffer of Harbour. “So we just started throwing him crazier balls.”