🎧 David Harbour Got Tired of Watching TV. Then Came ‘DTF St. Louis’

David Harbour wanted to show a new side of himself on DTF St. Louis, the HBO limited series he had spent years developing even as he filmed his final episodes as the heroic Sheriff Hopper on Stranger Things.

But it turns out he wasn’t entirely ready for a certain group of people to see that new side. 

“A lot of the crew on DTF were similar to the crew of Stranger Things,” says Harbour, who has spent a lot of time in the past decade on soundstages in Atlanta, where both shows were shot. “They had watched me be a really hard, machine gun-toting Hopper going after Demogorgons and stuff. And then I was dancing around in my underwear with Jason Bateman. And they accepted me in both realms.”

Harbour wore a large prosthetic belly and unflattering clothes to play Floyd Smernitch, a lonely suburban stepdad and ASL interpreter who winds up dead under mysterious circumstances in the first episode of DTF St. Louis. It is indeed a big departure for someone who will also reprise his Marvel superhero role Red Guardian in December’s Avengers: Doomsday. But for an actor born in White Plains, N.Y., and who got his start in New York theater and in small character actor roles — including appearances in Brokeback Mountain and Revolutionary Road — DTF St. Louis offered Harbour something deceptively simple and appealing: a show he’d actually want to watch. 

“It’s gotten so hard for me to watch stuff anymore,” Harbour, 51, confesses on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. DTF St. Louis, which Harbour executive produced and developed for years alongside creator Steven Conrad, offered character-driven thrills that Harbour compared to the first season of The White Lotus. “The characters are larger than life, and there was like a heightened reality to the whole thing. I just wanted to live in those worlds.”

Though the show has its share of darkness — there’s Floyd’s suspected murder, infidelity among the characters played by Harbour, Bateman and Linda Cardellini and a lot of suburban malaise — Harbour also sees DTF as a counterbalance to a common contemporary worldview. Take modern James Bond, for example. “It does have a certain point of view, which is that the world is a dark place and you have to be hard to live in it,” explains Harbour, who appeared in the Bond film Quantum of Solace opposite Daniel Craig. “I think there was something about wanting to get some whimsy into the world and to subvert the dominant narrative that people are worse than they appear to be. Because I tend to find that people are better than they appear to be.”

In our podcast conversation, Harbour talks about how he and Conrad pushed the show through years of development and what it taught him about the business. “I was a complete neophyte, and I had no idea how hard it is,” he tells me. Fortunately, it paid off: DTF St. Louis is nominated for 13 Emmys, including two for Harbour — as supporting actor in a limited series as well as one of the show’s executive producers. 

Today’s podcast also continues our fall movie preview series, with The New York Times‘ Kyle Buchanan joining Christopher Rosen and me to talk about what’s ahead for the streamers this awards season. Netflix has a major Cannes pickup in La Bola Negra, Amazon has some starry titles premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival and Apple is backing Sian Heder’s follow-up to best picture winner CODA. But do any of them have what it takes to bring down what we all agree is already the frontrunner — Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey? Join us and find out!