David Harbour Talks Running, His New Video Game Movie And The Best Season Of ‘Stranger Things’

David Harbour is a runner now and he has the COVID-19 pandemic to thank for his new hobby. During those stressful days, with filming on productions like Stranger Things stalled and hospitals filling up, Harbour started having anxiety attacks.

“It was just a terrifying time,” he tells me over the phone. It got so bad, he went to his PT for advice. “And what he recommended was 40 minutes, low heart rate, steady state cardio,” Harbour says, “which is not in vogue in the fitness world now, but is really good for you not only your body, your heart, but also your mind. And so I started running and I run about 40 minutes, but very low heart-rate, like 135, generally for like 40 minutes and I found that—I thought I would have to do a lot of work with the anxiety—but instead your body just takes over and your breathing slows down and you just get into a rhythm and the mental things follow your body. And that to me is really simple and profound and it doesn’t take a lot of work and I really like that.”

We’re having this conversation thanks to Harbour’s involvement with Brooks Running and the Back On My Feet charity program. Harbour explains that the program is designed to get homeless people running as a first step toward getting housing and other resources. Basically, people who join the program commit to showing up to early runs three days a week for 30 days. Once you achieve that, you members move on to the Next Steps program, where they work with staff to create a personal road map to independence.

The most important thing about this? “Just showing up,” Harbour says. That’s the key. If the people who join this program can commit to showing up for the three runs each week, that achievement alone can make a huge difference.

Brooks Running teamed up with Harbour to surprise members of the Back On My Feet program this December, where he showed up as a surprise guest to run alongside the group. The sports retailer also ran a special Buy Gear, Give Gear program, matching purchases of running shoes and apparel with donations to the Back On My Feet runners.

‘Your Body Will Eat Itself’

Harbour says that running and fitness have made a huge impact on his life, and not just in terms of all the weight loss for Stranger Things 4. “I feel more vibrant and more alive when I’m doing cardio, when I’m running,” he tells me, though he says it can be dangerous. “If I go for a three or five mile run, I’ll eat more during the day.” To actually lose weight, Harbour had to go beyond exercise.

“When I did lose weight, yeah, I was doing a lot of restricted dieting. I was doing, you know what’s popular today, which is intermittent fasting and even though it’s very in vogue, I did find that it really worked for me because, you know I don’t really know how to cook for myself or do that clean protein thing that people can do. I tend to have to eat, you know, catering at the movie set. Or I have to get a slice of pizza or whatever, but if you just say to yourself right, I’m only going to eat one meal today you do tend to lose weight. Even if that meal is pancakes like you, you just aren’t getting enough calories and your body does burn fat.”

Harbour says about 80% of the weight loss was from diet, but “running and some Pilates and some weight training kind of keeps you from getting—I don’t know—kind of saggy, you know? I wanted [Hopper] to have in season four, I wanted him to have, a kind of a lean and hungry look, so to speak, and so that came from some running and some weight training, but the majority of it is if you really want to lose weight, it’s like you just don’t eat very much and your body will eat itself.”

At this point I note that being hungry sucks and David says it doesn’t get any better with time. “You think that you’ll get used to it,” he says. “Like oh yeah, like in nine months I won’t feel this . . . but hunger always feels like hunger. And it sucks.”

Violent Night

Harbour dropped 75 lbs in seven months for Stranger Things 4, and that lean and hungry look was a stark contrast to the Chief Hopper we’d known from the first three seasons. But the weight started coming back, as it so often does, though Harbour had a very good reason to pack on some pounds. Unlike the starved and emaciated Hopper, his next role required a belly. Harbour plays a boozy, ass-kicking Santa Claus in the new film Violent Night, and that required a very different physique.

“I went into this Violent Night thing and I did put on a lot of weight and tried to make him look very different,” Harbour tells me, “and then I had a a horrible meeting with my doctor after who was like ‘You gotta stop doing this’ so, so you know I picked up the running, and I I will say, even when I’m at a heftier weight when I’m doing the running three times a week. There’s something about—and again, this is anecdotal, like I can’t point to scientific evidence of this at all, so I don’t want to—but I will say just anecdotally that my skin looks better like I just have a vibrancy to my being.

“You know, if you want to look good in this world, which I think a lot of our training is about, like looking good like you know our society is very into looks—who can blame us?—but if you want to look good, there’s something that low steady-state cardio, low heart-rate cardio, it just feels like my skin clears up.

“I still can be a little bit soft in the middle,” he says, but with the cardio he feels more clear—physically and mentally. A big part of it, Harbour notes, is just making yourself get up and go. He ties it back to the Back On My Feet program and the importance of just showing up.

“There’s something to showing up,” he says, “and there’s a lot of times when you don’t feel like going to the gym or you don’t feel like going for a run. And then you just start and that ability to just show up, after you do it you feel so proud of yourself that it’s one of those things that works on so many levels. You just you just look better. You feel better. It all is one.”

‘Run Happy’

David Harbour was already in his 40s when he started running. So how does someone who has never made running a habit even know where to start?

“Brooks has this great campaign that we started a couple months ago,” he says, referring to the It’s Your Run campaign. “It’s your run and run happy. You don’t always have to run happy,” he clarifies, “but I think the biggest problem that I get into and that a lot of people get into when starting an exercise routine is you beat up on yourself because you’re not good at it. And when I started running in the pandemic, I was not good at it and it meant that I would run for maybe three minutes and then walk for seven and then try to run for another couple and then walk again and that’s okay.

“It’s really about sticking with it that’s important,” he says, “and it’s about showing up. So even you don’t even run—if you just decide ‘Alright, I’m going to show up on Monday morning at 8 am and I’m going to be so frustrated and not want to run that I’m just going to stand there for half an hour’—I mean, those types of things. Making that commitment is, I mean it’s 90% of the battle because eventually you will run and you will get better at it and you will achieve something great.”

I joke that when the monsters from the Upside Down show up you’ll also be able to run away, which is pretty useful.

“Absolutely, run away,” he says. “Or if you’re Hopper, just grab a sword and run towards them.”

“Right, yeah, a Conan sword,” I chime in. “Actually, I have a Conan sword on my wall behind me right now so I got a kick out of that.”

“Ohhh you are a geek, aren’t you, wow?” he says laughing. “Alright, I’m part of the club, don’t worry.”

Why Run When You Can Drive?

Speaking of geeks, Harbour’s next big project in 2023 is the Gran Turismo movie being directed by Neill Blomkamp of District 9 fame.

“I’m shooting a movie right now called GT,” he says, that’s “loosely based on the Gran Turismo video game, but it’s about racing basically. It’s about Le Mans and different races and it’s really an incredible movie. It’s directed by Neil Blomkamp—who, I never say his name correctly—but he directed that District 9 movie. Really interesting director. So I’m shooting that now in Budapest.”

I mention that video game adaptations have always been a little tricky to get right, but he says this is a different kind of video game movie. There’s no story in Gran Turismo, so they were able to make it all up from scratch.

“You know the great thing about GT is there’s no story in that video game, it’s just a driving simulator right? But it’s about guys that race these sims and about the real world of racing.

“I think one of the problems that video game movies have is like, at least when I see a video game movie, I want to be playing that character. I don’t want somebody to have him do things for me or her do things for me. I want to play that character. And this is a very different type of movie and there’s also a lot of practical, crazy racing stuff, so I’m very excited about it.”

Still, a video game movie was a bit of a concern for Harbour. “I was nervous when they told me it was a video game movie because I generally think they’re all very hard to make well. And then when I read the script for this, I thought it was just gorgeous.” When he heard Blomkamp was directing he was sold. “The shooting has been, it’s been just really great. I’m very excited about it,” he says.

Beyond GT, Harbour starts production on Stranger Things 5—the final season of the popular Netflix show—in the middle of 2023 and will be shooting that and the new MCU film Thunderbolts—about Marvel “villains/losers” Harbour says—at the same time for what sounds like a brutal 8 month stretch of filming.

The Best Season Of Stranger Things

Speaking of Stranger Things, I have to ask one final question: Which season was the best season?

“Wow,” he says, thinking for a moment. “I mean, I’m a purist. So I do love Season One. I mean, I like the fact that we’ve expanded and you know, everybody’s . . . the budgets are bigger so we’re all making a little more money and we’re all like, you know, I mean that’s all great, so I don’t want to look back with too much nostalgia. But I will say there’s some kind of creativity in the fact that we were nothing, and that we didn’t have much of a budget and we had to be very creative and the monster was just some guy in a suit, and there was some kind of magic about that. And the fact that no one had discovered us, where we were very pure. I felt like, in the shooting of that we were very pure. When it came out, it was very pure and I just loved that season.”

I agree. Season One was absolutely pure and great and so surprising and unique. Truly a singular moment in modern television.

You can learn more about the Back On My Feet program at its official website. Brooks Running’s Buy Gear, Give Gear program resulted in over $650,000 worth of donations to the charity program, with donations continuing throughout 2023.

David Harbour’s Violent Night is in theaters now, just in time for Christmas. It’s on my Best Christmas Movies list as the lone theatrical entry. Check it out!

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