Steven Prusakowski
There’s always more to a David Harbour performance than what first meets the eye. On the surface, his characters can appear straightforward – a tough small-town sheriff fighting monsters, or a middle-aged Midwestern guy stumbling through life. But look closer, and the real men reveal themselves.
In HBO’s DTF St. Louis, the show itself offers the perfect perspective for this idea. As one character observes, “No one’s normal. They just look that way from across the street.” Nothing is more fitting than applying this show quote to Harbour’s work, where his everyday exterior hides his characters’ deepest vulnerabilities.
This is nowhere more evident than in his Emmy-nominated performance as Floyd Smernitch, the kind, insecure, and devoted, the three words Harbour used to describe him, ASL interpreter at the center of Steven Conrad’s dark, funny, genre-defying limited series. Yet the same quality carries over to Jim Hopper in Stranger Things.
As my guest on TV Topics, Harbour spoke about pouring himself into Floyd. The character’s quiet desperation for acceptance became a guiding force for everything else about him.
“Well, he started out as this Playgirl model, which he took great pride in and sort of let himself go and became this different thing. He got married and then he found the ASL stuff, which really gave him a new purpose, but also caused a huge rift and divide in his marriage,” explained Harbour. “He really needs that acceptance, that there is this piece of him that really wants to just do good, whether or not it’s known as societally successful or not. He needs someone who understands him. The fact that Clark learns sign language with him, the fact that he thinks it’s beautiful that he does sign language, is so arresting to Floyd. He’s just searching desperately for someone to accept him.”
That search is as much physical as it is emotional, and it takes some delightfully unorthodox forms – intense musical ASL interpretations that have him signing with so much passion you cannot help but smile, hip hop dance classes where the 6’3” Harbour towers above his youthful classmates, and even a full-on Beastie Boys-style rap performed on nerdy tri-wheeled bikes.
The Thunder Boys rap itself evolved almost organically on set. What began as oddly written dialogue in the script gradually turned into a full song and rap sequence, and the world is better for it.
“There was something in the script where it was written sort of weird and I said to Steve, ‘What are we doing with this? This is kind of like a poem.’ He said, ‘Should we make it a song?’ And so we did it. And surprisingly enough, they kept it in.”
For Harbour, these were among the more joyful parts of bringing Floyd to life.
“I think it is really fun. I think thrilling is the word for it. The ASL was very hard and very challenging, but the exuberance of the dancing and allowing this character to have, even though he has a big body, a lightness to his body and a certain joy to his body because from his youth he was a very physical guy. He was always interested in his body, even to do Playgirl…. The concert with the ASL, the dance classes, the rap and stuff. All this stuff was a blast. It’s a blast to do weird stuff like that.”
While the incredibly cringy yet surprisingly catchy “Thunder Boys” rap, complete with the peak-dork line “We’re the Thunder Boys, we’re going to ace that motherf*ing life insurance physical!”, may have been a blast, another core element of Harbour’s performance, one tied directly to Floyd’s neediness, required months of dedicated preparation – American Sign Language.
“It was very difficult. About 4 months before we started, I was finishing up Stranger Things and I got a coach in New York and also one in Atlanta and I was back and forth and I would try every day or every other day to work with her. I started because I wanted to be fluent in it as much as I could as opposed to just sort of knowing the phrases. It’s just very different to learn a language and then to learn it with your hands is so strange too,” confessed Harbour. “The translation of your brain to your mouth seems easier than to your hands. It was also very gratifying. It was really fun to be able to have a conversation with her and be able to express things. Then once we get on set I just felt a certain confidence that was able to even change things up. Part of the thing about ASL is one thing and then what they do on the news is different, a little freer form. And then there’s the signing at concerts. You’re just conveying what the music feels like. There’s a lot of creativity in that.”
Harbour gives credit to his co-stars and show creator for allowing all these pieces to come together successfully. He called working with Jason Bateman some of the most fun he’s had acting in his whole life. The two middle-aged men cracked each other open in scenes of need and tenderness that feel far more relatable than you would expect. The tone of the series required constant “zhuzhing,” balancing whimsy and weight so the humor never undercut the heart.
Harbour described creator Steven Conrad’s approach as treating certain moments like a pop-up book. “Steve describes it in this way that is quite extraordinary and beautiful. He says that things exist sometimes as a pop-up book,” explained Harbour. “When you’re reading a pop-up book, you’ll read a page and then something will pop out. We had these moments that are larger than life.”
He also credited Linda Cardellini who played Floyd’s umpire gear-wearing, Carol. Even with the complexity of her character, Cardellini locked in that delicate tone early on. “When Linda came in and read for Carol, she just nailed the tone in such a sophisticated way,” beamed Harbour. “I was so inspired by what she’d done that I was like, ‘Oh, she’s really cracked it for me.’” (For Linda’s perspective on DTF St. Louis, be sure to check out her episode of TV Topics.)
One of the most unexpected sources of insight into the performance, Harbour revealed, was actually his most iconic role. Reflecting on Floyd’s darkest moment, he drew a direct line to the beloved Hopper on Stranger Things and how both characters find ways to persist through their vulnerability even when others would give up.
(Major Spoiler Warning for the ending of DTF St. Louis)
In what was an infuriating and soul-crushing final moment for many who loved the character, Floyd does not run out to stop his stepson after he misunderstands what he sees when he discovers a barely clothed Floyd hugging Clark, played by Bateman. When asked about this fateful decision, Harbour clarified that the choice essentially displayed his approach to the character. Floyd believes he has already ruined the boy’s life, that his own brokenness is fundamentally incompatible with being the protector Richard, played by Arlan Ruf, needs. The only “generous” act left, in Floyd’s fractured view, is to remove himself entirely.
“That really is where I started with the character. He realizes at that moment Richard will probably… It’s the darkest place in the whole show and it’s the reason why it goes actually to suicide. He realizes that he’s ruined Richard’s life. I think in that way Richard opened up to him, was able to trust him, sort of doing better in school. Like all this stuff happened when he opened up,” shared a visibly moved Harbour.
“In that moment Floyd realizes that his biology is somehow fundamentally broken and incompatible with taking care of this kid. And he realizes in that moment that Richard’s going to be scarred and going to go back to worse than throwing milk and I mean, it’s going to be awful. […] The only thing he can do is kill himself in the hope that maybe that will somehow have some kind of resonance. Like this is dysfunctional. I am a piece of garbage.”
“I was fascinated by it with Hopper as well, where there are certain things in life that happen and we all just continue on. But when those things happen, like the death of a child. Like Hopper’s child was 5 years old and died of cancer and you go like how does that? How do you wake up in the morning? What do you do, walk around and stuff? And I think that this is like one of those moments where it’s… and then Floyd checks out. He’s like he realizes that he can’t, there’s no going home. There’s no, it’s over. And in a way I think there is a piece of him that feels like it could be a generous gesture to Richard. As fucked up and weird as that sounds. It’s like, you can write me off now. You can write me off. You can still be live, but you can just write me off as a fucking weirdo or whatever. Yeah, it’s a very mysterious moment. It’s very dark. It’s very dark. But also I didn’t want to underplay the reality of life in that moment where there’s certain things that if a kid sees or if things happen that it just can’t be undone.”
There is no talking to Harbour without discussing the role that introduced many of us to the actor. As I have had the chance to do with other cast members, including TV Topics guest Jamie Campbell Bower, I asked Harbour about saying goodbye to Stranger Things – his last day of shooting.
“Last day of shooting was the wedding with Winona Ryder, the marriage. It was very surreal because we were talking about moving to Montauk – and me being the police chief in Montauk. Originally, 11 years ago, Winona and I sat down and the show was called Montauk. We were going to be shooting a show in New York about Montauk. So there was something quite fun and surreal that the Duffers put in just for us. Stranger Things had been a whole roller coaster of all kinds of things. And so I think those last few weeks… I showed up to the last day of shooting. It was the kids doing the D&D. I showed up there too, right before they wrapped and heard them give all their speeches and stuff. It’s just really beautiful to watch these kids who’d grown up on this show… just to think about meeting them when they were like 11 and 12 and it’s just nuts. It’s just really almost too weird and profound for any sort of simple response.”
Throughout our conversation, Harbour also played along with the usual TV Topics questions. He recalled his childhood as a full-on TV junkie who watched everything from Saturday-morning cartoons to Thirtysomething with his dad, named Rick and Morty and South Park as reliable sources of laughs, and chose a very unexpected answer to the “magic door” question.
For an actor who provided so many thoughtful answers, it showed another side of him, one that only makes him more than meets the eye. Be sure to watch or listen to the full interview below for more on DTF St. Louis and the television that shaped him.
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