The actor has lost a total of 27 kilos by the end of the series.
Taking into account that lost a staggering 55+ pounds for the role of Hopper, how David Harbor shed so much weight for ‘Stranger Things’ season 4 has been puzzling many viewers. Already in the first season of Stranger Things, the body of the actor has played a surprisingly important role in the series. In the opening scenes of the series pilot, Stranger Things featured the disheveled police chief waking up from a drunken night with his sizeable belly on display.
Hopper’s “father body” did not marry the other, more chiseled, protagonists, so viewers and fans of the Netflix hit They were waiting for news about it, which took place in the third season. A problematic subplot that season saw the belligerent Hopper making rude advances to his special friend Joyce Byers played by Winona Ryder was a reminder that the character wasn’t always the harmless teddy bear that many viewers thought of him. And already in the fourth season of Stranger Things introduced a new version of Hopper much thinner, and the actor put a lot of effort into the dramatic transformation that should be echoed.
Harbor lost more than 25 kilos to play Hopper in the fourth season of Stranger Things, losing weight around the same time he was shooting flashbacks for Marvel’s Black Widow. Harbor’s weight loss was a huge stretch, as the actor needed to portray a beaten and brutalized Hopper, trapped in a remote Russian prison camp. However, while the process was grueling, Harbor’s method of losing weight was far less complicated than many of the body transformations actors undergo.
According to the actor himself, it was “amazing, you try to do all these different things, protein and this and that, and then you just stop eating and lose weight”. Of course, just because this method was effective doesn’t mean it was necessarily safe or medically correct. Harbor himself admitted as much: “I was hungry for a lot of the shoot” and admitted that the huge weight loss probably affected his performance. The actor said of his 60-pound drop that “I think you’ll see that it’s not very good for me, mentally and nutritionally” and the evidence for this claim is easy to find in the fourth season of ‘Stranger Things’.
Like the numerous body transformations of other actors for their roles over the years, Harbor’s slight build and exhausted face make his worn and demoralized Hopper that much more believable throughout the fourth season of ‘Stranger Things’. Harbor lost weight to make his portrayal of a prison camp inmate more impactful, though there was an ironic side to this transformation. This is not the first time that Harbor has portrayed a character who went through a secret Russian prison and undergoes a drastic change, she also lost weight to play a younger version of her Black Widow character, Red Guardian, in flashbacks.
As the Marvel movie was shot at the same time as the fourth season of Stranger Things, Harbor technically lost weight to play a Russian prisoner after gaining weight to play another Russian prisoner., so both roles required opposite physical transformations of the star. Fortunately, Harbor was able to line up her shooting schedule and make sure she only had to go through this once…
Source: Fotogramas
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
