David Harbour
David Kenneth Harbour (born April 10, 1975) is an American actor. He has played supporting roles in films such as Brokeback Mountain (2005), Awake (2007), Revolutionary Road (2008), State of Play (2009), W.E. (2011), A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), Black Mass (2015), Suicide Squad (2016), Sleepless (2017), No Sudden Move (2021), and Gran Turismo (2023), and starring roles as the title character in Hellboy (2019) and Santa Claus in Violent Night (2022); in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Harbour has played Red Guardian in the film Black Widow (2021) and the animated series What If...? (2025).
Not to be confused with Dave Harbour or Dave Barbour.
David Harbour
Actor
1994–present
Harbour gained global recognition for his portrayal of Jim Hopper in the Netflix science fiction series Stranger Things (2016–present),[2] for which he received a Critics' Choice Television Award in 2018,[3] two Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award nomination.[4][5]
Early life[edit]
Harbour was born in White Plains, New York, to Kenneth and Nancy (née Riley) Harbour, both of whom work in real estate—his mother in residential and his father in commercial.[6] He attended Byram Hills High School in Armonk, New York, along with actors Sean Maher and Eyal Podell. He graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1997,[7] where he majored in drama and Italian and was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.[8]
As a young man in New York City, David Harbour frequented and participated in gambling at underground poker clubs, and attests that he personally knew the gangster who John Malkovich's character "Teddy KGB" was based on in the 1998 film Rounders.[9]
Personal life[edit]
Harbour had relationships with Alison Sudol and Julia Stiles.[19][20] Since 2019, he has been in a relationship with singer Lily Allen. They made their red carpet debut during the 26th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. They married on September 7, 2020, in Las Vegas in a wedding officiated by an Elvis impersonator.[21] The couple share a Brownstone house in Brooklyn[22] and worked with the architect Ben Bischoff.
Harbour previously followed several religions, including Catholicism and Buddhism. He is a former believer in the paranormal.[23][24]
In an interview with The Guardian on his role in Black Widow in July 2021, Harbour said he was a socialist: "I don't know that there's anyone who could disagree with socialist ideology"; and later, "The idea of a kindergarten-type society where we share things is my ideal society—as opposed to this world where we're hunting and killing and destroying for our own personal hoarding, our own personal greed."[25]
Harbour struggled with alcoholism in his past[26] and has been sober since he was 24, after hitting "rock bottom" as he faced homelessness, loneliness and thoughts of suicide.[27] He began drinking as a teenager and the habit worsened during college. He decided to stop drinking after feeling "very lonely and needing a different direction in my life", and has said, "I enjoy consciousness too much now" to drink again.[8]
At age 26, Harbour was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[28][26][29][30]