Even as one of the breakout stars of Stranger Things, David Harbour says he can be brutally honest about the Netflix series. But he has nothing but praise for the upcoming series finale — the script for which, he says, brought the cast to tears.
“Look, I’m very close to the show, so I have very strong opinions, and they may not match yours if you’re a fan of the show,” Harbour told the crowd at a New York Comic Con panel for the 10th anniversary of the podcast Happy Sad Confused on Thursday, October 17, per People.
“I’m an actor on the show. So I see the nuts and bolts… I can be very critical of this show,” said Harbour, who plays Jim Hopper on the sci-fi hit, due to return in 2025. He said he’ll get mad when he thinks the show has offered a bad episode or a season he doesn’t like.
But the Stranger Things writers did right by the show with the series finale script, according to Harbour. “They land the plane, and it is the best episode they’ve ever done,” he said.
In fact, the cast shed tears at a table read for that last installment, Harbour revealed. “The end of this episode, when we were reading it — just us reading it — about halfway through, people started crying,” he said. “Then, about the last 20 minutes, it was just uncontrollably crying, waves of different people.”
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He added that costar Noah Schnapp was his “favorite” cryer of the bunch — and teasingly imitated Schnapp’s sobs for the NYCC crowd.
Harbour previously amped up excitement for Stranger Things’ fifth and final season on Happy Sad Confused, saying in an August 2023 episode that creators Matt and Ross Duffer “continue to outdo themselves” with “terrific” scripts.
“I mean, the set pieces and the things in the scripts that we saw are bigger than anything we’ve done in the past,” he said. “I’m excited to wrap it up in a bold, amazing way. … They’re going to pay [the characters] off in big ways because they’ve lived with you for the past eight years.”
Stranger Things, Fifth and Final Season, 2025, Netflix
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