David Harbour Shares ‘Intimate’ Details About The Series Finale Of ‘Stranger Things’

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 18, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 18, 2024 |

Series finales for popular shows do not have a great track record. Yes, everything has its defenders. Someone will tell you that the series finale for Battlestar Galactica left them satisfied and smiling, and you should disappear out of those people’s lives like Starbuck. You can probably find someone at a party who will tell you how much they loved the cast of Seinfeld getting thrown in jail. Hell, I’m on record confessing my enjoyment of the Game Of Thrones finale (*shields face*).

Some people are okay with closure no matter how they get it. Some shows are canceled without ever getting to finish their story. Others go on for years and years with no ending in sight. Seeing a show run its course on its own terms can be cathartic. It won’t always be satisfying, but that can also be incredibly subjective. It will always vary from viewer to viewer. The same can be said for the cast.

Being on television is work. It can be fun work! It’s considerably more enjoyable than a lot of other jobs. But it is still work. There will still be employees who don’t get along. Some will try harder than others, leaving some to pick up the slack. Sharon will, without a doubt, microwave salmon in the break room. Some things are universal! Or, in the case of Stranger Things, everyone is a big happy family.

That seems to be the case if you listen to David Harbour! He’s one of the show’s stars and is also staring down an upcoming finale. Stranger Things will come to an end with season five. We’ve seen nothing from it and yet plenty have already declared the move to end the show as too soon or not soon enough. The cast is taking things one step at a time, with Harbour noting that the table read of the finale was particularly special.

“No, the interesting thing is … there was some cameras there, but we didn’t do it for the publicists or the Instagram people,” the actor explained to the folks at ComicBook.com. “There was something intimate about the way they structured it that I’m hoping that you don’t see very much of that, because there was something profound in the sense that we are a family. There is the deeper level, it is about us as individuals who’ve worked together for nine years since they were kids, and that really came through. There was a real deep kind of honesty and heartbreak and bittersweet quality to all of it.”

It makes sense that he would be happy to do the table read with the whole cast. He spent most of season 4 without them! “[Season 4] was a challenging season for a number of reasons. The biggest being COVID and just the ripples that that sent through our industry, because we are an industry of intimacy. I mean, we are close. We are about humanity. We’re about engagement and we had masks and face shields and we were just very afraid of each other,” Harbour said to the website. “So that was really tough. I also had to do a lot of weird weight loss stuff, that was really tough. The being alone thing is it was kind of OK because I had to. I mean, we’ve been together a long time, it’s like it’s like a family, sometimes you need a vacation. So I think that was in a way sort of fun, and I had guys like Tom (Wlaschiha) and it was it was a cool storyline. So I enjoyed it.”

Stranger Things has been on Netflix since 2016. Harbour reflected on watching the kids grow with the show. “Getting back to the OG crew of this final season has been wild in a way because we have come so far and it is not the show that we started in Season 1,” he explained. “I think that’s a wild experience for all of us. I mean, those kids were 11 years old when we started, 12 years old. Now they’re 20 and they’re shaving and they aren’t kids anymore. Finn (Wolfhard) just directed a movie. I think to have it all come back full circle… We just read we just did a read-through of the last episode and the amount of crying… like the episode is very beautiful. But there’s also a deeper level of that, this was actually their childhood. They were 11 years old and grew up and fought this monster. And I’ve never seen so much heavy, heavy weeping from teenagers or young adults in my life.”

There’s no guarantee that anything will be good (and it’s always a miracle when it is). We don’t know yet if Stranger Things will stick the landing. But I have hope, and if that hope helps me enjoy it? All the better.