{"id":645982,"date":"2026-08-19T19:32:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T19:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/645982\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T19:32:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T19:32:11","slug":"david-harbour-on-dtf-st-louis-asl-and-avengers-doomsday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/645982\/","title":{"rendered":"David Harbour on “DTF St. Louis,” ASL and “Avengers: Doomsday”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cDTF St. Louis<\/a>,\u201d David Harbour<\/a> goes quiet.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 51-year-old New York-born actor plays Floyd, a performance built around four months of daily American Sign Language practice. The work earned him his first Emmy acting nomination since 2017 \u2014 and his first in the limited series category, this time as an executive producer through his production company, Bravo Axolotl, the banner he founded in Dec. 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI spent about four months before the shoot just daily practice with a woman in New York and also someone in Atlanta, and I got to the point where I could definitely have conversations,\u201d Harbour tells Variety. \u201cIt\u2019s beautiful. I\u2019d like to pick it up again; I just got real busy and I put it down.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLearning the language, he says, rewired something in his brain. \u201cIn French, I\u2019ll listen to the English and then interpret how I say it,\u201d he says. \u201cWith sign language, you do get to the place where it becomes a different piece of your brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor an actor who has made a career out of his physicality, playing a character who is contained and mostly still presented a different kind of challenge \u2014 one Harbour says came easier than expected.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI found things about Floyd very difficult to uncover and figure out, but that was not one of them,\u201d he shares. \u201cI\u2019m a big guy and sort of masculine in certain ways, but there are other times when I go home and I\u2019m just by myself, reading a book or playing video games. I\u2019m very introverted. So there\u2019s a lot of that in Floyd. He\u2019s a dreamer, a sweet guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the performance\u2019s signature moments is an interpretive dance during a concert sequence, witnessed by his nominated co-stars Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini \u2014 the scene I flagged as the one that makes Harbour a contender. It was shot with remarkable speed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOn the day, it was very quick. I only shot one take of the complete thing,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI was very nervous about the signs. I knew what I was doing, but I had somebody across from me to help me out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDTF St. Louis\u201d arrives with 13 Emmy nominations, making it one of the year\u2019s most recognized miniseries. For Harbour, who also served as a producer, the group recognition means more than the solo attention he received during his first Emmy campaign.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBack then it was pretty singular, focused on you as an actor,\u201d he says of his 2017 nominations for \u201cStranger Things.\u201d \u201cGoing into this, it\u2019s the show. It\u2019s every single actor. \u2018Stranger Things\u2019 wasn\u2019t mine. I was jobbed in,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel so proud. It\u2019s my baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReviews have framed Floyd as the role that finally sheds Harbour\u2019s \u201cgenre actor\u201d label<\/a>. Harbour resists the idea that the label was ever a cage or a hurdle to his progress as an artist.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve always known who I am, because I came to it so late \u2014 I was 40 when I hit \u2018Stranger Things,\u2019 and at that point you\u2019re a theater actor doing all these roles,\u201d he says. \u201cI always knew I had it in me. It was a matter of whether the world would give me the opportunity. And even if the world won\u2019t give me the opportunity, I\u2019ll just do it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHence the production company.<\/p>\n

\n\tHarbour recalls shooting a scene with Bateman on \u201cDTF St. Louis,\u201d surrounded by crew members he first met on \u201cStranger Things,\u201d who had watched him run around with prop guns as Hopper.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThese are guys who watched me for years be tough-guy Hopper, and there I am dancing around with Bateman, and they\u2019re all applauding me,\u201d he says. \u201cI was like, oh, hillbillies like us, we\u2019re OK.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cStranger Things\u201d ended its five-season, 10-year run earlier this year, and Harbour describes the finish as peaceful.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe were all sort of ready to move on,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhat we\u2019ll mainly miss is the fan base. These people love it so much that you don\u2019t want to let them down or leave them hanging.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHarbour is already busy. He\u2019s excited about \u201cEvil Genius,\u201d a dark comedy romance directed by Courteney Cox that is set to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. \u201cShe\u2019s a very smart woman who loves actors and loves the process,\u201d he says of Cox\u2019s direction. \u201cWhen you see this movie, you\u2019ll be like, whoa, Courteney Cox is interested in some crazy stuff. They\u2019re killing people, robbing banks, and they\u2019re in love. It\u2019s a form of love, but it\u2019s very strange choices. I like stuff like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd of course, he\u2019s reprising his Red Guardian role in \u201cAvengers: Doomsday<\/a>,\u201d out in December. As always, we pressed Harbour for any detail about the next Marvel Cinematic Universe installment and asked him to recite a line from the movie, completely out of context. He offers a deadpan line in a Russian accent (and pointing): \u201cYou \u2026 are Tony Stark.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMore telling is what Harbour wants to build next. He says he is \u201cstuck in this love affair with producing\u201d and is developing a larger project with collaborator Steve Conrad. He\u2019d love to build something on the scale of \u201cThe Odyssey.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Chris Nolan stuff is amazing, incredible \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t turn it down,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I want to be in the trenches with somebody coming up with it. What\u2019s the contemporary anxiety we\u2019re all dealing with? What are men and women up to in modern America?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith an Emmy potentially in reach, Harbour wants to return to the stage: new plays, plus one classical swing. \u201cI\u2019d love to do \u2018Coriolanus,\u2019\u201d he says, \u201cmaybe with all this \u2018Odyssey\u2019 hype, bring back a little Roman stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOff the clock, Harbour disappears into role-playing video games. \u201cI like things where you can get fetishistic about the numbers and the damages,\u201d he says, currently deep in \u201cPath of Exile 2.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe even has a pitch for an adaptation. \u201cI\u2019ve always thought the Warcraft universe is underutilized. It\u2019s as good as the Greeks, as good as the Odyssey. Come on, Chris Nolan \u2014 I want to see a Chris Nolan version of \u2018World of Warcraft.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI concur.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cDTF St. Louis,\u201d David Harbour goes quiet. The 51-year-old New York-born actor plays Floyd, a performance built…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":645983,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[268],"tags":[6724,434,24991,168058,18,7612,117,19,17],"class_list":["post-645982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-avengers-doomsday","tag-celebrities","tag-david-harbour","tag-dtf-st-louis","tag-eire","tag-emmys","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645982\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}