'Stranger Things' Star David Harbour Shares Most Difficult Part of Season 4

Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 2, premiered on Netflix on Friday, July 1, and to mark the occasion David Harbour spoke about his experience of playing Jim Hopper in the new episodes.

Speaking during a live Q&A session alongside co-star Jamie Campbell Bower, Harbour reflected on what was the most difficult part of filming the season.

David Harbour Shares Most Difficult Part of Season 4

The event was originally intended to be part of a live watch party with Netflix on Scener from 11:15 p.m. PT, only the website crashed at the last minute because of high demand, so the actors moved over to Instagram.

While there, Netflix Geeked host Terri Schwartz asked Harbour about the most challenging parts of Season 4, whether it was preparing for his fight scene with a Demogorgon or his powerful speech claiming he was "a curse" on all of his loved ones.

Harbour chose the latter, saying that it was particularly difficult to prepare for because he had been given the speech three years in advance, and the pandemic meant he was preparing for it much longer than anticipated.

The speech, which appeared in Volume 1, sees Hopper tell Russian prison officer Dimitri (Tom Wlaschiha) about how he felt responsible for his daughter's death, and that he didn't think he deserved happiness with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) or Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) because of it.

"They wrote that monologue three years ago and I sat there waiting to deliver it for about two years, during all of lockdown and it's a strange thing to live with a monologue," Harbour reflected.

"That is something that the Duffers have talked about Hopper having, this Agent Orange poison, from the very first season we talked about his daughter's cancer and how Hopper himself is toxic in a certain way.

"I'm always interested in this idea, too, of a man chasing himself like in that movie Memento, that he is the villain of his own story, the fact that he was a curse this season with Vecna's curse has lots of different overtones."

Sharing why having the speech for so long brought unexpected pressure when he did finally get on set, the actor went on: "It's very interesting to do that, but I did have to wait around for two years to give that monologue and the amount of play that gets in your head, and the amount of self-consciousness you have to overcome when you do it is actually incredible.

"I think that was the most difficult thing this season."

Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 2, is out now on Netflix.