Harbour, who may be best known as the reluctantly heroic police chief Jim Hopper on Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” can currently be seen in “Black Widow,” the Marvel movie directed by Cate Shortland that opened over the weekend.
Alexei is the latest in a series of strangely compelling deadbeats for Harbour.
As he explained in an interview on Thursday: “Winners are great, and we like them, rah-rah.
Now 46 years old and married to the pop singer Lily Allen, Harbour said he was happier to have found success at this stage of his life.
Speaking via video from New Orleans, Harbour talked further about the making of “Black Widow” and “No Sudden Move,” his offbeat influences and the comfort of working with Soderbergh during a pandemic.
I sat down with her, and she said, “I’m doing this ‘Black Widow’ movie for Marvel with Scarlett Johansson.” And then she proceeded to pitch my character as this dude who’s big and violent with tattoos and gold teeth and also needs you to like his jokes.
He now has such deep regret and emotional guilt, but he can’t feel any of those things.
Even when I’d play villains, people would say, “There was a way that you humanized the experience so that we understood someone, as opposed to judging them.” So that’s what flatters me — you’re using me as an artist to understand this deeply troubled and confusing individual that a less capable person would make a mockery of.
I did feel like Rachel was the woman I was meant to be with — no offense to Lily Allen, because she is the actual person I was meant to be with — but it did feel like Melina and Red Guardian had something beautiful.
I had grown the beard and the hair for “Stranger Things,” and I was like, “Let’s use the weight.” So I started eating even more.
It’s really good to start the relationship from that part, as opposed to being the young, handsome buck and watching yourself degenerate over the years.
But I’m the anti-Tom Cruise when it comes to this stuff.
In “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” you have this schlubby leading man and you put him against Robert Shaw, who’s like the most bad-ass Brit in the world.
It really was Carmen Cuba on “Stranger Things” who was like, “I know this guy’s been the villain and he’s been fifth and sixth on the call sheets for a long time, but I think he’s the Harrison Ford.” No one had seen that before.
A couple people couldn’t do it so a couple replaced them, and I was one of them.
There is a carrot that gets dangled in front of him, and as one of the characters says in the movie, he had the brass ring and he just let it go by.
I would go to Soderbergh and be like, “When is this going to be over?” And he would be like, “Oh, sometime early next year, there’ll be vaccines.” I was like, “Which one?” He’s like, “Pfizer’s doing very well — two shots.” It was incredible.
As opposed to this dad he’s become, eating chips and salsa and yelling at his teenage daughter, you’ll unearth some more of the warrior that he had been.
And that truly came from being humiliated on the set of “Black Widow,” being not able to do those things.