Soon-to-be Hellboy David Harbour has compared the red-skinned monster hunter of the upcoming reboot to his famous turn as Police Chief Jim Hopper in Netflix’s hit sci-fi series Stranger Things.
“Yeah, he’s terrifying!” Harbour said about Hellboy in an interview with Vanity Fair. “There’s that question of, why am I fighting this battle? Just because of some sense of justice, or some sense of good? It’s a really interesting question that sort of is at the core of him, that he struggles with . . . I know that [writer] [Mike] Mignola and [director] Neil [Marshall] and [producer] Lloyd [Levin] all watched Stranger Things and saw that in what I did there, which is similar. He has a heart that’s really good and with a lot of this crusted-over stuff. What I’m dealing with in Hellboy is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. It’s very Shakespearean. It’s demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who’s trapped in horrible circumstances who’s just trying to be a good guy.”
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Harbour has large shoes to fill after the duo of fan-favorite Hellboy films from director Guillermo Del Toro and actor Ron Perlman, but Harbour seems to be more than up to the task. Elsewhere in the interview, he explained how excited he is to play the role, calling Hellboy a “classically complicated hero.”
Director Neil Marshall previously helmed cult-classic horror film The Descent and a slew of genre television shows such as Game of Thrones, Hannibal and Black Sails. However, Hellboy will be his first venture into mainstream filmmaking.
In July, Harbour was nominated for an Emmy award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, and is up against Homeland’s Mandy Patinkin, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Joseph Fiennes and The Crown’s Matt Smith, as well as Peter Dinklage and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones fame. Last year, Harbour lost to The Crown’s John Lithgow, and this year’s winners will be announced on September 17.
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Hellboy is directed by Neil Marshall and written by Andrew Cosby. The film stars David Harbour as Hellboy, Ian McShane as Trevor Bruttenholm, Milla Jovovich as Nimue, Sasha Lane as Alice Monaghan, Penelope Mitchell as Ganeida and Daniel Dae Kim as Ben Daimio, and is set for a January 2019 release.