By this time next month, it will have been two years since the third season of Stranger Things debuted on Netflix, leaving fans briefly concerned about the fate of David Harbour’s character Jim Hopper. While a subsequent teaser clip released in early 2020 confirmed that Hopper is still alive (albeit a prisoner), the rollout many fans expected for the new season was halted due to the pandemic.
For the latest update on the season 4 production, we turn to Harbour himself, who was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel’s show Tuesday night. Around the 4:15 mark in the video up top, Kimmel asked Harbour if he was finished shooting the new season, resulting in some insight that supports the current leading assumption that Stranger Things 4may not arrive until next year.
“I mean, you’re not supposed to say but I’ll tell you,” Harbour said. “Yeah, I’m almost done. I’ve got one more, like, little stint. We should be done in, like, August. I gotta shave [my head] again.”
From there, Harbour reflected on how long it’s been since he and the Stranger Things team finished production on season 3. He also addressed the similarities between Hopper’s mysterious relocation and his Black Widow character Red Guardian.
“I knew that I was going to be in this Russian prison and then literally a month later I got a call from Marvel that they wanted me to to play a guy who starts out in a Russian prison,” Harbour said. “I was like, this is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what Twitter and Reddit and all those guys do with it. So there’s all these conspiracy theories that, like, you know, Hopper went to Russia and then put on a supersuit and now he’s the Red Guardian in this Black Widow movie.”
While shooting Black Widow, Harbour said he made a habit of taking pictures of the set and sending them to Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer to make sure the two different prison situations were noticeably distinctive.
“I kept sending these photos,” Harbour told Kimmel on Tuesday. “And then finally at the end, I had all this hair and all this beard and we planned to do it that way and I was like, guys, we can’t do this. I’m coming out with this Marvel movie. I can’t have the beard and the hair. So we came up with a whole different look for [Hopper]. We had him shave his head and this whole thing.”
Catch the full interview, which also sees Harbour discussing his mid-pandemic marriage to Lily Allen, up top.
Black Widow hits theaters on July 9. An official release date for Stranger Things 4 has not yet been announced.
