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    David Harbour Is Conflicted About Becoming a Morning Person

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    Working on the new movie “Thunderbolts*” and the TV series “Stranger Things,” he said, “You’re up early at 6 in the morning. But I still have that beast inside me that wants to sleep till 1 p.m.”The Red Guardian never made the varsity squad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that’s more than OK with David Harbour.“Of the people that do love these movies, we are not the favorite,” he said of the antiheroes in the new Marvel film “Thunderbolts*.” “But we really poured our hearts into this movie and tried to make something that is about isolation in modern society and light and the darkness that is within all of us.”During what Harbour called a bit of a nightmare, he worked on “Thunderbolts*” at the same time he was shooting the final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which he plays Hopper, the heroic small-town police chief. He is currently working on “DTF St. Louis,” an HBO limited series and the first thing he has produced, with Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini.In a video call from Los Angeles, he elaborated on the headphones, sunglasses and Zen mantra that he considers essential. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.An AmericanoI drink it all day long. My doctor has told me to knock it off, but it is the last vice I have. I have an assistant and she does a lot of great things for me, but probably the No. 1 job is she brings me too many Americanos throughout the day.Wired HeadphonesI love a tangled cord. I used to carry a CD player back in the early 2000s and I would put on headphones and walk around the East Village and have my little soundtrack to my life. Just sort of float through.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Florence Pugh and Pals Kick Some Asterisk

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      The actress is the main attraction in Marvel’s latest, about a group of ragtag super-types who join forces to (spoiler alert!) save the world.For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hollywood Actors Are Leaping Into Video Games

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      Onscreen stars have increasingly been going virtual. Jodie Comer and David Harbour are making their video game debuts in a remake of the 1992 horror game Alone in the Dark.A stream of actors who built their careers in Hollywood are making their digital presence felt in video games, a once stigmatized medium that is increasingly seen as a unique storytelling platform with the ability to reach large audiences.Some are voice acting, transferring skills they may have honed in animated movies or TV shows, while others are contributing their likenesses through advanced motion-capture technology that can replicate furrowed brows and crinkled cheeks.Last year, Cameron Monaghan led Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Megan Fox portrayed a character in Mortal Kombat 1, and Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves provided the backbone of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty.In this month’s remake of the 1992 horror game Alone in the Dark, both Jodie Comer, who won an Emmy for “Killing Eve” and a Tony for “Prima Facie,” and David Harbour, known for his work on “Stranger Things,” are making their video game debuts. They are among the group of actors meeting younger generations where they already are.“I hope that people are still watching two-hour movies decades from now, but I know they will be playing video games,” Harbour said in an email.In a behind-the-scenes video by the game’s publisher, Comer said that working on the movie “Free Guy,” set in a fictionalized video game, gave her a newfound appreciation of the industry. “It’s so incredible to be able to kind of step out of what you usually do and explore something new, and kind of challenge yourself,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Once Upon a Pair of Sticks

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      A popular racing video game series gets turned into an underdog sports drama in this big-screen adaptation.Since the late 1990s, the Gran Turismo racing games for PlayStation have brought in billions of dollars, rivaling the box-office bounties of some movie franchises. It was only a matter of time before a movie offshoot arrived, following in the tracks of other live-action adaptations of PlayStation games, including last year’s “Uncharted.” “Gran Turismo” the movie tells the true (but unlikely) story of Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo maven who became a professional racer of actual cars on actual tracks.Mardenborough’s leap from pixels to asphalt was an effective advertisement for Gran Turismo as more than a game, but his transition wasn’t all smooth. In the director Neill Blomkamp’s dutiful telling, Jann (Archie Madekwe), a teenager from Cardiff, Wales, faces doubters and steep learning curves to go with the racetrack curves. His underdog story — can this digital driver make it in the real world? — doubles as an old-fashioned tale of a young man proving his worth to his family and other skeptics.Madekwe’s Jann is so unassuming that every step in his journey comes as a pleasant surprise. After Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou) says there’s no future in gaming and brings Jann to his job at a rail yard, Jann goes off and wins a contest held by Nissan to recruit promising Gran Turismo players. (His mother, played by Geri Halliwell Horner, is a bit more encouraging.) He earns a spot in the company’s racing academy, which is overseen by a hard-nosed engineer, Jack (David Harbour), and an unctuous marketer, Danny (Orlando Bloom). Once again Jann exceeds expectations and beats out a more TV-ready competitor for the chance to race professionally.The movie begins to resemble the levels in a video game, as Jann enters races worldwide to clinch his contract with Nissan. He finally beats an obnoxious front-runner (Josha Stradowski) in Dubai and celebrates in Tokyo, but he flips his car on his next race (as the real Mardenborough did in 2015, though the film adjusts the chronology). Like many sports movies, there’s no shortage of training and competition — the perpetual buildup. A finale comes at Le Mans, the annual 24-hour race.Blomkamp’s handling of the track scenes lacks a compelling physicality, or (if you’ll pardon the term) drive — the editing and camerawork could each use a sharper sense of rhythm and velocity. That might not matter so much if it were paired with a strong screenplay, but the platitudinous script here lacks flair (though Jann does have the likable quirk of listening to Enya or Kenny G to chill out before races). Madekwe conveys a youthful vulnerability and an appealing air of quiet doggedness, even if he’s mild-mannered as a performer here. The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.Gran TurismoRated PG-13 for intense action and some strong language. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Have a Ghost’ Review: Me and My Boo

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      David Harbour stars as an apparition haunting a family’s home in this supernatural Netflix comedy.The screenwriter and director Christopher Landon (“Happy Death Day”) will nevermore shudder at a bump in the night. Henceforth, it will just be specters thanking him for “We Have a Ghost,” a cheery kids comedy heavily syruped with pro-ghoul propaganda. Gauging from his appearance, Ernest (David Harbour) — a kindly, nonverbal ghost so named for the embroidery on his bowling shirt — died during the Nixon administration. Since then, Ernest has done spirit fingers in the attic of a cartoonishly spooky three-story Queen Anne, although the creepiest thing about him is his combover.The gag is that Ernest’s scares are no match for the Presleys, a modern family of the internet age — the demographic of the film’s intended audience, although its ideal viewers will dial down their cynicism and play along. When a Realtor (Faith Ford) hoodwinks the Presley clan into buying the place — “Nothing a little landscaping couldn’t fix,” she coos — the younger son, a shy teenager named Kevin (Jahi Winston), embraces Ernest like a rescue mutt. Kevin’s father, Frank (Anthony Mackie), and older brother, Fulton (Niles Fitch), however, want to use him to get rich and famous. Frank’s rap sheet of cash-grab gimmicks has already dissipated respect for him in the home; even so, he fares better than the kids’ mother, a character so underwritten she’s practically vapor. (Worse, the lead part of Kevin is almost as lifeless.)Landon’s tale, based on a snarkier short story by Geoff Manaugh, presents Ernest as the first viral video proof-of-afterlife — an odd situation for an unassuming chap who passed away before the invention of Pong. Before you can say “Boo!” Ernest becomes a meme, a stunt challenge, and a cause célèbre among TikTok do-gooders (“Just because you’re not made of matter, it doesn’t mean you don’t matter”). He’s also a target for a C.I.A.-connected paranormal researcher, Dr. Monroe (Tig Notaro), out to boost her own clout.The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene: a stalker dressed like Jesus, a nifty car chase, an unconvincing romance between Kevin and his wacky neighbor Joy (Isabella Russo), who blasts energy into the film as soon as she enters blaring a slide trombone. Jennifer Coolidge also has a cameo as a blasé cable TV medium who visits the house and waves off Ernest as a hologram until he rattles the furniture and melts the skin off his face. These high jinks are so carefree about coherence that during this rampage, we hear the screech of a terrified cat. Do the Presleys own a cat? No.Conveniently, Ernest’s personality has been wiped by a case of necrotic amnesia that allows this Greatest Generation ghost to pal around with today’s teenagers. In life, Ernest might not have been their first choice to babysit. In death, he’s graced with the empathy of E.T. — and when he makes contact with Notaro’s character, the world-weary doctor melts into a state of wonder as dewy as when Sam Neill made goo-goo eyes at a brachiosaur. How delightfully morbid to give the netherworld a Spielbergian gloss. For his next trick, Ernest can study some scare tactics in the Temple of Doom.We Have a GhostRated PG-13 for language, suggestive references and violence tied to Ernest’s untimely death. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Playing Santa Onscreen Takes Much More Than Just Donning a Red Suit

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      David Harbour, George Wendt and Tim Allen explain the acting challenge that is Jolly St. Nick.David Harbour isn’t the first actor most of us would cast as Santa Claus. Maybe it’s because he prefers to roll in the muck with his characters — the police chief Jim Hopper in “Stranger Things,” the super-soldier Alexei Shostakov in “Black Widow” — rather than snuggle with them.But to the director Tommy Wirkola, Harbour was perfect.For “Violent Night,” his new holiday gore-fest, Wirkola needed an actor with presence and chops: the ability to play Santa as a drunk depressive who has lost faith in humanity, Christmas and himself, but whose goodness still radiates.“Literally in our first meeting, somebody brought up his name, and it was one of those moments where we just looked at each other,” Wirkola said in a video call from Los Angeles. “It was almost too obvious; it’s such a good idea.”“Violent Night” puts Santa in the right place at the wrong time, a Christmas Eve heist at a billionaire’s mansion. He’d happily fly back up the chimney were it not for 7-year-old Trudy (Leah Brady), who has pleaded for help over the walkie-talkie her parents told her was a direct line to Santa. So he digs deep into himself and his sack of toys to summon the courage and the weaponry to save her.“I’m pretty sure it’s intimidating to some extent for an actor to do the role of Santa Claus,” Wirkola said. “So many actors have done it before, in so many movies. So how can we make it stand out?”Suiting up as St. Nick may sound like a frolic around the tannenbaum, a welcome break from more serious roles.If only.We talked with three stars about what went into portraying a Santa for the ages.David Harbour, ‘Violent Night’Alex Hassell, left, Beverly D’Angelo, Edi Patterson, Alexis Louder and Leah Brady with Harbour in “Violent Night.”Allen Fraser/Universal StudiosAs Harbour and Wirkola fleshed out their Santa, they decided he couldn’t be comical or the movie wouldn’t work. So Harbour played him straight.“It’s just inherently funny when people treat him as if he’s in on the joke, like, ‘Oh hello, Santa,’” he said, “and he’s completely deadpan because he is Santa.”And because the dynamic between Trudy and Santa needed to be respectful — and never condescending or cloying — Harbour watched the 1947 version of “Miracle on 34th Street” on his iPhone at night, recording scenes with the Santa and the child characters to discuss the next day as he and Wirkola developed the script.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“That was the real movie I thought about all the time on set,” he said by video from Budapest, where he was shooting the upcoming film “Gran Turismo.”Harbour’s Santa was visually modeled on an old-school Coca-Cola advertising fantasy, with a curlicue beard and rosy cheeks. But that Santa wouldn’t drink himself horizontal or power-vomit on a woman. Nor would he display a Viking’s ferocity.This Santa was a warrior, which meant that Harbour had to become one, too.But as more of Santa’s origin story was revealed through action sequences, the question became what to show when.“David was adamant that he didn’t want him to be too good too quickly, or too cool too quickly and say too many cool lines too fast,” Wirkola said. “In the first couple of fights, he’s stumbling around and barely surviving. David didn’t want him to feel superhuman in any way.” Even if Harbour sometimes felt that the role’s demands required feats of imagination that more dramatic roles — where the depth and complexity is written into the script — did not.“It was a lot of digging in and trying to create a character and an arc that would be meaningful,” Harbour said. “The funny thing is, we might look down on work that happens in a soap opera or an action movie as being not artistic. But when I see somebody do something impressive in a soap opera, I’m always like, ‘You must have worked really hard on that.’”“And yeah, I worked really hard.”George Wendt, ‘Elf: The Musical’George Wendt opposite Sebastian Arcelus in “Elf: The Musical.” He was asked to humanize his Santa.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times George Wendt used to joke that if you stayed fat enough and got old enough, the Santa roles would start rolling in. But that was hardly what landed him “Elf: The Musical,” a 2010 stage adaptation of the 2003 Will Ferrell comedy. (He reprised the role in 2017 at Madison Square Garden.)“Did I want to be in the original cast of a new Broadway musical? It was a big yes,” Wendt, who is now starring in the rom-com “Christmas With the Campbells” on Amazon Prime Video, said in a call from Los Angeles. “I had just been on Broadway in ‘Hairspray.’ I was fresh meat, so to speak.”His instinct, and that of the show’s writers, was to humanize his Santa, maybe make him a little funnier than you’d think he would be — but go light on the schmaltz.“Any time I started to veer into what might be sappy Santa, Casey Nicholaw, the director, would be like, ‘Bup bup bup bup bup, don’t you dare!’” Wendt said. “He wanted me to keep it real and flip, not a reverential Santa in any way.”Wendt has played Santa five or six times — he’s lost count — and while “Elf” might have been his highest-profile gig, “A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!,” in 2008, was his weirdest one.“I came down the chimney with a bowie knife between my teeth because this bear was stalking Colbert,” he said, referring to the late-night host Stephen Colbert. “So I brawled with the bear, and I ripped him open with my knife, with Colbert cowering in a corner. And when I slit his belly open, Elvis Costello came out dressed as Bob Cratchit.”But whether he’s cracking New Jersey jokes, like in “Elf: The Musical,” or saving TV hosts, being Santa comes with an inescapable irritant that makes you wonder how the jolly old fellow grew rotund in the first place.“It’s really hard to eat much with all that hair on,” Wendt said. “That beard — that’s awful. It just goes right in your mouth, no matter how careful you are.”Tim Allen, ‘The Santa Clause’Tim Allen, opposite Eric Lloyd, in “The Santa Clause,” the film that kicked off the franchise.DisneyFor nearly three decades, Tim Allen — who jokingly claims not to be fond of children, his own included — has played Scott Calvin, a divorced dad forced to fill Santa’s suit and boots, starting in “The Santa Clause” (1994). Two sequels later, he has extended his run with “The Santa Clauses,” a new Disney+ series about Calvin’s quest to find a worthy successor.Now Allen can’t get away from kids.“I have to make up stories to real children all the time when their parents say, ‘This is Santa Claus,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not,’” he said, calling from Manhattan. “I play along, and I joyously do it. But it’s a little overwhelming, to be honest, for a very aggressive comedian.” In fact, “The Santa Clause” was a far darker comedy when Allen signed on. He kind of remembers that Calvin might have shot Santa.“To this day, it’s one of the best scripts, top to bottom, I’ve ever read,” he said.But for the series, Allen wanted — demanded, really — a story with a beginning, middle and end, as well as explanations for some lingering questions about what happened to the original Santa and the process for selecting a new one.“We answered those in a very wonderful, organic way,” he said. “So I had, in this one, conceptual strength in the script room. ‘Let’s get to these points and the jokes will come. And once we get to the funny stuff, I can add.’ That’s kind of my strength.” Physically getting into character originally was not.In the first film, Allen spent four hours in the chair each day, often followed by 10 hours in a hot, heavy suit — an affair he called psychotic.The process has since been streamlined, but its effect is still undeniable.Allen recalled the hush that fell over 225 people on the first day of shooting not so long ago, as he walked onto the set in his gorgeous velvet suit and uncannily realistic headpiece with beard, mustache and flawless skin that make him look younger even if you’re right next to him.“And all of a sudden you have adults, half adults, children looking at me with these big grins on their faces, and they’re silent,” he said. “I realized the magic of this image — that whatever it means, it means the same thing to all of the children in these people.”“It’s a responsibility. I don’t make fun of it.” More

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      in Movies

      Watch Santa Throw a Punch in ‘Violent Night’

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      The director Tommy Wirkola narrates an action sequence from his new film, which stars David Harbour as Santa Claus.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Santa shows how he deals with someone very naughty in this scene from the action comedy “Violent Night.”David Harbour stars as the jolly (or here, more melancholy) bearded fellow, who is delivering presents to a house when a gang of thieves lays siege to it. Santa confronts one, code-named Tinsel (Phong Giang) and the two tussle around a Christmas tree. Gingerbread houses and Christmas lights all get used as weapons. But viewers also learn that Santa has a few true fighting skills up his sleeve.Narrating the sequence, the director Tommy Wirkola discusses putting Harbour through training for the demanding choreography, as well as using a stunt performer who is also an actor to play Tinsel. The bulk of the fight is shot in one take, and for some of the more aggressive action (like crashing into a Christmas tree or being flipped), a technique called a Texas switch is used to swap out Harbour for a stunt performer.Read the “Violent Night” review.Watch more Anatomy of a Scene videos.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Violent Night’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      in Television

      ‘Black Widow’ Star David Harbour Loves Being a Big-Screen Loser

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      The actor talks about his roles as a failed superhero in the new Marvel blockbuster and as a milquetoast accountant in Steven Soderbergh’s “No Sudden Move.”This article contains spoilers for the films “Black Widow” and “No Sudden Move.”It’s never a particularly good time to be a loser, but it’s an excellent moment to be David Harbour, who embodies misbegotten characters so fully in his latest movies.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. In it, he plays Alexei, a Russian super-soldier who formerly led a thrilling life as the costumed champion Red Guardian. Now confined to a wintry prison where he has become feral and overweight, all he can do is reminisce about good old days that may not have happened as he remembers them. That is, until his rescue by Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), the spies he raised as his own daughters.Alexei is the latest in a series of strangely compelling deadbeats for Harbour. He also appears in Steven Soderbergh’s new HBO Max thriller, “No Sudden Move,” as Matt Wertz, a milquetoast accountant drawn into a criminal enterprise that’s well out of his league.And these are precisely the kinds of characters that Harbour loves to play. As he explained in an interview on Thursday: “Winners are great, and we like them, rah-rah. But to me, the beauty of human beings is in the flesh and the failures. We’re all frail.”Having performed over the years in Broadway productions of “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “The Coast of Utopia” as well as in films like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Revolutionary Road,” Harbour called his current renaissance “another step in a very even-keeled, slow trajectory, which I like.”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. If he’d had this much attention as a younger man, Harbour said: “Oh God, that would be miserable. It took me so long to cultivate an artistic voice. If I had people judging me so early about whether or not they liked what I did, I wouldn’t be able to survive that.”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. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Harbour with Scarlett Johansson, left, and Florence Pugh in “Black Widow.”Jay Maidment/Marvel/DisneyIs there a story behind how you were cast in “Black Widow”?It’s oddly pedestrian. I have friends who tested for “Guardians of the Galaxy,” who talked about a top-secret lair and getting sides [dialogue pages] and then they burn them. My agent said Cate Shortland wants to meet you for a movie she’s doing. He didn’t even know what it was about. 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. She pitched me these incredible contradictions, and we talked about all these family dramedies with desperate people — movies like “The Savages” and Ricky Gervais on “The Office.” And I was like, hell yes, on so many levels.Please, elaborate on the Ricky Gervais connection.It’s just that he’s so desperately insecure, and that insecurity manifests itself in boastfulness. I love people like this. He now has such deep regret and emotional guilt, but he can’t feel any of those things. So all he does is exist on his sociopathic charm and his need for validation. Someone like Hopper [in “Stranger Things”] has guilt, but it’s so internal, whereas he’s loud in every way. Smelly and sweaty and big and hairy. So cringey, as the kids say.Is it flattering to be told by a director that she sees you as this person?I have such an odd ego. I am always flattered, and then I look back years later and I go, what were you flattered by? I’m sort of an outcast myself. Growing up, I was, certainly. And I’ve always wanted to act because I wanted people to feel less alone. 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 maybe proceed to do both. But I can hopefully give you some understanding of him.Had you ever worked with Johansson, Pugh or Rachel Weisz, who play the other members of your makeshift family?I had never even met them. But then we had rehearsals for about two weeks, which is rare on a movie this size, and we really did take on those family dynamics, right from the get-go. 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. Scarlett felt like the oldest child; I started to see her as rigid in a certain way, and I started to poke fun at her rigidity. And Florence really felt like the baby of the family; I just wanted to coddle her and make her laugh.Which did you film first: the prologue scenes where your character is neat and trim, or the main sequences where he has gone to seed?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. I got up to 280 pounds, and I loved it. I said to the first A.D. [assistant director], “Listen, we have to shoot the flashback stuff at the end, so that by the time we shoot the flashback, I’ll lose the weight and I’ll be thin.” And he was like, “You’ll never be thin.” [Laughs.] I was like, “Yes I will, man.” And I lost like 60 pounds through the shooting. The first stuff we shot was at the prison, so that belly that’s coming at you, that’s all real belly. And then as we shot, I started to lose weight. I was just hungry a lot of the shoot.”I’m the anti-Tom Cruise” when it comes to stunts, said Harbour, with his four-month-old puppy.Akasha Rabut for The New York TimesYou’re a recently married man — how was all of this physical transformation playing at home?[Dryly] It’s a true testament to my undeniable charisma when I say that my wife met me at 280 pounds with this beard and this hair. We went on a date at the Wolseley [restaurant] in London, and she really fell for me at my worst, physically and hair-wise. So as the thing went on, I started losing the weight and working out. And she honestly has some mixed feelings about it. Which is a good place to be in a relationship. 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.Did you get to do many of your own stunts on the film?They really want you to do it. They’re very encouraging. But I’m the anti-Tom Cruise when it comes to this stuff. I do not want to fly the helicopter. I want Alexei to be a production of eight different people. I’m the face. I’m very happy to put the stunt people in. But I do my own arm-wrestling. I wouldn’t let anyone else arm-wrestle for me.Your best-known characters now are men who, underneath their exterior shabbiness, possess at least the potential to redeem themselves. How did this come to be your particular turf?That’s what I love about Alexei and what I love about Hopper. It comes from my view of Walter Matthau. 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. You think he’s never going to take this guy. But there’s something about his American heart that we want to love, and I love embodying that. Once Hopper rolled around, it was like, swing for the fences. Give him the dad bod and let him smoke cigarettes, have him be a total mess.Just a few years ago, you were playing a lot of intimidating bruisers and flat-out villains. How did you pivot from that?It was very interesting to be perceived as a villain. There were heavies, but then I was cast as true, dangerous psychopaths, too. There’s something about the mental freedom of the psychopath that I can embrace in a certain way. It really was [the casting director] 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. I always blamed it on the jawline or the brow, whatever it was. It really takes a sophisticated eye to go, it doesn’t matter whether he has a double chin. His heart is there.Harbour as a milquetoast accountant opposite Amy Seimetz in the new Steven Soderbergh crime drama, “No Sudden Move.”Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.How did you get your part in “No Sudden Move”?It got shut down during Covid, so they refashioned it and put that movie back together. A couple people couldn’t do it so a couple replaced them, and I was one of them. Steven Soderbergh’s process is very simple: He sent me the script. Would you like to do this? Yes, very much. And then I met him on the first day.Going by only the screenplay, what was your read on the character?Matt lives in a prison of his own making. The tragedy of Matt is that he can’t be who he is, and he’s been living this lie for a long time. 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. That’s the true tragedy of Matt Wertz. There’s some excitement that he may actually get to live a life, finally, after so much struggle. And he disappoints us. [Laughs.]Was this the first film you made during the pandemic?That was my first pandemic shoot. “Stranger Things” had come back for Season 4 in September, and they didn’t need me until January. And I freaked out. I love my wife and kids, but I also need to go to work, because I’ll lose my mind here, trying to home-school them. This job came to me, and I took it. We were in Detroit for two and a half, three months, sequestered in a hotel. But luckily it’s Soderbergh. He did “Contagion.” So all the C.D.C. guys that he worked with on that were there on set. We were talking about the vaccines. 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. You’re making this movie and you’re finding out what’s actually happening at the C.D.C.Harbour on being asked to play losers: “I have such an odd ego. I am always flattered, and then I look back years later and I go, what were you flattered by?”Akasha Rabut for The New York TimesWhat are you permitted to say about the new season of “Stranger Things”?Ugh. I want to tell you something. I have my prepackaged answer, which is true, that it’s a super-exciting season. It’s gone to a whole other place. It started out, in Season 1, with this small-town police chief, and now it’s become this sprawling thing with a Russian prison and a monster. The brothers [series creators Matt and Ross Duffer] are big into video games, manga and anime, and we definitely play on that this season. We talked about “The Great Escape” and “Alien 3” as influences. In terms of Hopper, you get to see a lot of back story that you haven’t seen before, it’s only been hinted at. 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.Having now made a mega-budget Marvel movie, was there anything you could take from that experience into “Stranger Things”?I do a lot more stunts this season than I’ve ever done. And I — if I do say so myself — did some pretty impressive things. And that truly came from being humiliated on the set of “Black Widow,” being not able to do those things. There is an ego in me that’s growing. Hopefully by the time I’m 55, I’ll be hanging out of a helicopter as well, making my own version of “Mission: Impossible.” More