David Harbour thought Hopper should’ve died by suicide in ‘Stranger Things’ season one

Stranger Things star David Harbour believed that his character, Jim Hopper, was going to take his own life at the end of the first season.

• READ MORE: Stranger Things season four part one review: all the terrifying thrills you’ve come to expect

Harbour has played the character, a police chief in the small town of Hawkins, for all four seasons of the hit Netflix sci-fi series, with a fifth and final season in production.

When audiences first met him, Hopper was stricken with grief over the death of his daughter from cancer, something he believed he attributed to having worked with chemical weapon Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

Given this background, the Thunderbolts* actor revealed in an interview. thought he would have ended things. GQ journalist Hayley Campbell wrote: “Harbour read the scripts and was convinced the first season should have ended with Hopper dying by suicide. To him, it was the only way Hopper could apologise to his daughter.”

In the time since, the character has been through a number of traumatising experiences, and hinted that the fifth season will be no different. “We shot a lot of nights, and there is a lot of action, and we’re fighting evil in a very direct way,” the actor said. “Hopper is a man of action – there’s a lot of running around.”

Elsewhere in the interview, he was also full of praise for the show’s young stars, who have grown up with the series.

“It’s why we cast them: because they were different than other kids,” he explained. “I’ve always wanted them to preserve that. It’s my thing with artistic integrity – I’ve always wanted them to know where their specialness comes from. That it’s not from how many followers they have or how much they sell, it’s that we saw something in them.”

The final season of Stranger Things does not have a specific release date yet, but is expected to arrive on Netflix this year.

Stranger Things fans were given a first look at the fifth and final season last year. The show marked the halfway point of production over the summer, before wrapping on its last-ever run of episodes in December.

Sadie Sink – who has played Max Mayfield since season two – recently teased Stranger Things‘ “super emotional” final season. “I’m ready to cry with everyone,” she said.

In other news, an animated spin-off of Stranger Things is currently in development.

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