David Harbour Changed His ‘Stranger Things’ Look Because Of A Weird ‘Black Widow’ Coincidence 

In Stranger Things, David Harbour plays a character who ends up in a Russian prison. In Black Widow, David Harbour plays a character who we meet in a Russian prison. It’s not a case of typical Hollywood casting, but rather an odd coincidence, as the No Sudden Move star explained on Tuesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live.

Harbour finished shooting Stranger Things season three in March 2019 and “then literally a month later, I got a call from Marvel that they wanted me to play a guy who starts out in a Russian prison,” he told host Jimmy Kimmel. “This is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what Twitter and Reddit and all those guys do with it.” But Harbour intentionally got ahead of r/StrangerThings by requesting a new look for Chief Hopper.

“I had this long hair and this beard and I was big and I thought, ‘I can’t be the same guy with long hair and a beard in the same prison,” Harbour said. He covertly took pictures of the Black Widow set and sent them to Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer to make sure that they “didn’t use any of the same colors as the set and making sure the looks were different and the outfits were different.” He continued:

“I had all this hair and all this beard and we had planned to do it that way. I was like, ‘We can’t do this. I’m coming out with this Marvel movie. I can’t have the beard and the hair,’ so we came up with a whole different look for [Hopper]. We had him shave his head and the whole thing.”

That’s a nifty way of not wanting to deal with facial hair maintenance (“Uh… yeah… it’s totally for a Marvel movie”). Respect. Watch the interview above.