David Harbour Was So Frustrated By Netflix’s Stranger Things Marketing That He Shaved His Head

If we went back to the summer of 2016 and told David Harbour that the final season of “Stranger Things” is the biggest thing on TV in 2025, we can’t know for sure what he’d say — but he might call us liars and accuse us of giving him false hope.

In fact, during the initial rollout of Netflix’s nostalgic horror saga, Harbour reportedly was pretty frustrated with what he perceived as a half-hearted marketing campaign. In an interview with Radio Times, series co-creator Matt Duffer recalled that Harbour “was discouraged by the lack of subway ads.” 

“When we were working on Season 1, we weren’t expecting there to be a Season 2,” said Duffer. He noted that while Harbour “loved doing the show and he was proud of it,” the actor was also the “least confident that the show would be successful.” In the days leading up to the Season 1 premiere, Harbour cut himself off from the outside world and shaved his head.

The actor behind troubled lawman Jim Hopper got pretty intense about nailing his performance, which made production on “Stranger Things” Season 1 simultaneously “the most miserable time” and “sort of the greatest time” in Harbour’s life at that point, according to his chat with Kyle MacLachlan.

“You got a shot at like, sort of the Pro Bowl here,” Harbour said of the role. “Why not sacrifice six months of your life to have something resonate very deeply if possible?”

While David Harbour put a lot of pressure on himself behind the camera, his character is similarly relentless in his quest to find the missing Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) during the first season of “Stranger Things.” Meanwhile, there are a few other connections between Harbour’s real life and Hopper’s TV life. In Season 1, a seemingly depressed Hopper uses alcohol to cope with the death of his daughter. On a 2018 episode of “WTF with Marc Maron,” David Harbour discussed his own struggles with substances and mental health.

“I don’t do that stuff anymore, either,” he said when Maron mentioned drugs and alcohol. “Off the s**** for 15 years.” Harbour also told the podcaster that he was diagnosed as bipolar and briefly institutionalized during his mid-20s, describing his experience in a mental asylum as “really not as fun as you think [it’s going to be].”

Then there’s the less serious, coincidental connection: In Season 4, when Hopper reemerges following his apparent demise during the Season 3 finale, he comes back with a shaved head.