David Harbour discusses ‘Hellboy’ shoot
Following the success of Stranger Things, David Harbour has landed the key role in the Hellboy reboot and opened up about the experience during his interview with Collider.
“It was the hardest shoot I’ve ever done, primarily because there are just so many stunts in it. It’s a very action-packed movie,” Harbour told the outlet.
“There’s a lot of story, too, and a lot of big scenes, but there’s a lot of action. There’s a lot of me running around, jumping and turning, and punching stuff. It’s crazy! I’m 42, and the fact that no one asked me to do this in my 20s is so insulting. Why did I have to become a super-monster in my 40s?! My bones are not the same as they used to be. It was very hard, in that way, but it’s also really thrilling ‘cause I get to carve out an entirely new mythos to this guy and I get to play on this big palette of witches and giants and demons.
“To me, it’s very Shakespearean. I grew up doing regional Shakespeare and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there’s something about that that you don’t really do in film anymore. We rarely see an indie film where you have an emotional pathos where somebody sees a ghost. This is a palette where you can have demons and ghosts and big creatures and things that are epic, in that way. That was super fun! In terms of the make-up, that was not that fun. I will say that I got to a weird place with it. I think we had 70-plus applications of make-up, which is a full mask. By day 30 or 35, I’d wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror and everything was blurry. And then, I’d sit in the chair and for an hour and a half or two hours, they’d apply that face. Then, I’d look back up in the mirror and be like, “Oh, there I am!” I started to associate my own image with that other face. That was pretty cool! I didn’t really like my own face, as much as I liked this guy’s face, so I’d get excited in the morning when I’d put on the different face, but it was hard. There was a lot of listening to music on headphones and a lot of sleeping, if you could with four people applying glue to your face. As hard as acting can get, and it really does get hard with 15-hour days of jumping around and hurting yourself and going without lunch and having to be in make-up for three hours, the one thing that I do remember is that there are people that have to do jobs that are far worse. For three hours, I’m in a weird uncomfortable position where people put glue on my face, but it’s what I love to do and the fact that I get to do it leaves me with a bunch of gratitude.”
Harbour likens his role as Hopper to Hellboy, how they are both “conflicted.”
“I love that, as a character, he’s such a complicated guy. In a certain way, he has a bit of the same dynamic as Hopper, where he’s very conflicted about who he is and he’s caught between two worlds. He develops a shtick to live, that could be charming to some and annoying to others. To me, it’s the kernel or essence of him that I find so fascinating and that I relate to so much. He’s a half-demon/half-man who’s lost in this world where he fights for human beings against monsters, so to speak, and yet he is part monster. There’s a very interesting thematic kernel about a guy who’s lost and who doesn’t understand who he is, and he’s really struggling with that. That’s something that we play out in the movie, and that’s really exciting to me to play. You can have all the humor and all the action, and then you get to play this very deep, personal truth of feeling like you’re an outcast, or like you’re making the wrong decisions with your life and you’d like to turn that around. All those concepts and themes are things that I find very interesting. In our culture today, I wish we saw more of these kinds of themes. It’s very exciting to be able to play a character that fully embraces that, where you can go to the theater and have that catharsis.”
He stars alongside Milla Jovovich, who plays a villain named the Blood Queen.
“She’s super bad-ass! I watched some of her coverage, and I was like, “Damn, you know how to work a camera!” There are people that understand the camera, and I’m not one of them. Man, she would do certain things and I would just be riveted and like, “Wow, you are so sexy and exciting and powerful and crazy! I don’t know how to do that. That’s amazing!””
Check out the full interview HERE
Hellboy is being directed by Neil Marshall (Game of Thrones) and sees Stranger Things star David Harbour taking on the title role alongside Ian McShane (American Gods, Deadwood, ) as Professor Broom, Sasha Lane (American Honey) as Alice Monaghan, Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) as the Queen of Blood, Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-O) as Major Ben Daimio, Penelope Mitchell (The Vampire Diaries) as Ganeida, Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda) as Lady Hatton, Brian Gleeson (mother!, 28 Days Later) as Merlin, and Alistair Petrie (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as Lord Adam Glaren.
Hellboy is set for release on January 11th 2019.
