David Harbor on failure, Lily Allen and that jaw-dropping Stranger Things finale

The day the movie was released and it was clear it was going to blow up, he called Ryan Reynolds. “I know him a little. I called him and I was like, Hey man, I just need to know something. You know Green lantern? Big fail for you. What the hell is that because I think I’m going to hit him right now. Am I going to be okay? Am I going to get through this?” Reynolds, for his part, was “sweet” about it.

A week later and Strange things 4 the finish was finally dropped. This time we jump on Zoom: Harbour’s in the back of a taxi, which takes him to an evening mad house productivity. He hadn’t seen it when we last spoke—perhaps he had already had a chance? “Yeah, I thought it was great. I like. It’s very touching,” he says, predictably beaming.

He recounts his favorite moments: Eddie’s heroic death (“pretty stunning”); El’s climactic mental battle with Eternal; “Empire Rock Strikes Back,” which sees Hawkins torn apart, engulfed in hellish flames. “You’d think there’s like huge fault earthquakes all over Indiana,” he says, laughing. “So I don’t know what the hell is going to happen in season five now.”

Hopper’s drastic weight loss is the basis of the joke after reuniting with Joyce and Murray, but hey, at least he was in good enough shape to defeat the Demogorgon with a sword. “I don’t know if you saw this, but that sword I picked up… it is actual support sword in which they used Conan the Barbarianhe says excitedly. “It is on a sword that Schwarzenegger wields in the film.

But even beheading a monster from the Upside Down can’t compare to Hopper’s greatest final moment. For the uninitiated: Strange things fans online have been clamoring for Hopper and Joyce to get together for as long as the series has been on the air, and the final episode saw them finally share an on-screen kiss. But was the plan always to make the ‘Jopper’ a reality?

“It’s always something that Winona and I have talked about — on set talking about what their relationship was like in high school and you know who they are to each other,” he says. “There was always a tension between should it be done or should they just be friends? And I really think it’s a bit of fan service. I think there was a real appetite for mum and dad to get back together. And once we were on the train, it seemed like an inevitability.