Transcript
music
Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.
promo
Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
jesse thorn
I’m Jesse Thorn. It’s Bullseye.
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“Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team. A fast, upbeat, peppy song. Music plays as Jesse speaks, then fades out.
jesse
It goes by many names. The biz, the industry, Hollyweird. If you’re lucky enough to work in pop culture, odds are you’ve seen a thing or two. So, on Bullseye [chuckles], we decided to carve out space for guests to share their wildest, craziest stories from their work lives. We call it The Craziest [Censored] Day of My Entire Career. On deck this week is David Harbour. He’s an actor. He starred as the title character in the most recent Hellboy film. He’s had parts in movies like Black Mass, Suicide Squad, Brokeback Mountain, and many, many others. But odds are, if you know David Harbour, you know him best from his role on Stranger Things. That is—and I’m taking a look here at Showbusiness Magazine—the biggest thing on television right now. It’s set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana. Harbour plays Jim Hopper, the town’s police chief. Not everything is as it seems in Hawkins. Hopper gets thrown into the middle of it when young Will Byers goes missing. Hopper offers to join the kids’ mom, Joyce, in the search. Joyce, of course played by Winona Ryder. The search for Will takes some extraordinary twists and turns. There are monsters, secret government experiments, parallel universes, and many other strange, scary things. So, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that when we asked David Harbour about the craziest day of his career, he took us back to the first season of Stranger Things and an intense, surreal onset experience. I’ll let David take it from here.
david harbour
Hi, this is David Harbour. And this the craziest [censored] day of my entire career. Uh, it was November of 2015. I was in a small suburb of Atlanta shooting one of the last scenes of the first season of Stranger Things for Netflix.
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“Stranger Things: Main Title” by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. [Volume decreases and continues under the dialogue.]
david
So, there’s a lot of like these old town centers in America. There’s a lot of sort of abandoned buildings, storefronts. And we’ve kind of taken over this town. And they’ve laid out these horrible looking plastic, purple vines all over these cars from the ’80s, all over the library building in front of us. [Music fades out.] And so, while I say it’s the craziest day of my career, it’s probably the craziest like—let’s say 36 hours. ‘Cause the day will end in half an hour, but I will continue shooting.
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Ominous synth.
david
I’m probably the most miserable and alone I’ve ever felt in my whole life. I’ve cut myself off from everyone. And I just like poured my heart and soul into this broken man, Jim Hopper, and his search for this lost little boy.
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Speaker (Stranger Things): You made a mistake coming back here. Hopper: No, I didn’t. It was just gonna happen. You’re gonna let me and Joyce Byers go. You’re gonna give us anything we need, and we’re gonna find her son. And then we’re gonna forget that any of this ever happened.
david
It’s like 11:30 at night when I go into makeup, but I don’t need much, because I’m meant to look like [censored] and I really do look like [censored]. Because I was already pretty tired and pretty hairy and messed up. And so, they just took a couple minutes to mess me up even further. And I get in the costume and I’m wearing this yellow space hazmat type suit.
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Swelling, surreal chords which fade into distortions.
david
It has like a plastic visor on it. And the minute we put it on, we realized that any time we speak or even breathe in these things, the glass on the front immediately fogs up and it doesn’t really work the way its intended. So, the note from production is, “If you guys could try not to breathe that much, it would help us a lot.”
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Hopper: What’s this? Speaker: Protection. The atmosphere’s toxic. Joyce: But my—my son’s in… there. Hopper: Put it on.
david
So, me and Winona Ryder suit up in these things, and any time we’ve gotta take a bathroom break, it takes about 45 minutes to get out of these things. So, once you’re in, you’re in. And we start filming the last sequence of the show. We’re trudging up through these vines I have a submachine gun; she has a flashlight. We have to walk slow as if we’re walking in some upside-down world, which we don’t really understand yet. It’s not really clear what it is in the script. And the core of the day is—to me—the emotional core of the entire season, at least for my character and for Winona’s character. And it’s when Hopper and Joyce find Will in the upside-down. And they remove this tube from his throat, and they resuscitate him, bring him back to life. It's a big, emotional moment.
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Warbling, distorted synth.
david
So, it’s about five in the morning. We’re just exhausted. And at this point, like Winona and I have let go of the idea that we’re gonna get anything good this evening. It’s just gonna be a bunch of weird sequences of us trudging through these weird, horrible, purple vines. And we’re just laughing and messing around. And then, we finally get to the point in the day before the sun comes up, where we have about—you know, 45 minutes to shoot this big sequence. And we finally get Will. We pry him off the wall.
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Music: Screeching synth. Joyce: Will! Will! [Clip continues under the dialogue.]
david
We shoot me pulling this CGI snake out of his mouth, which is just a little paper towel roll sort of covered gook. And as I pull from his mouth, I’m supposed to pretend that it’s coming from all the way down in his throat and it extends way in, and then I pull it out. Another joy of working with CGI things that aren’t practical or real.
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[Wet, squishing sounds.]
david
And then we finally get him on his back, and we have to do CPR to resuscitate him.
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Retro, ’80s style synth.
david
So, we start that sequence, and they wanna shoot it on me. And so, they put in a dummy for this little ten-year-old kid so that I can really do CPR on this dummy while—you know. I mean, Hopper’s desperate for this kid to live. And so, he’s—you know, really pounding on this kid. And then at the end of the sequence, he actually doesn’t even—you know, he does sort of a bit of that theatrical CPR, which is—you know, just like, “Come on, kid!”
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Music: Swelling, hopeful music. [Joyce sobs and pleads incoherently.] Hopper: Come on, kid! Joyce: Please, wake up! Please, please, wake up!
david
And I thought we were getting some good footage. We worked up really into it. And then, we do this for about 20 minutes. And then I guess the Duffers come up to me, ‘cause they realize that the shot’s really unusable without moving back and forth from the kid to me to doing it. And so, a lot of the stuff we’ve shot that I thought we got, we’re not gonna be able to use. So, we gotta go back and we gotta do it with this little ten-year-old kid. And they lay him into the ground. And you know, they start trying to do this scene. And I’m trying to fake it as best I can, but I want the scene to be alive and to be rich and to be vibrant. And so, I’m trying to like do this thing, and I realize—you know—as I’m doing this that I’m pressing on this kid’s chest a little bit. And he’s a trooper. He’s like, “It’s fine. Everything’s fine.” [Chuckles.] And I’m like terrified. So, you know, everybody’s on edge and we don’t feel like we’ve gotten it. And we finally do a take with him, Winona, me in place with the camera drifting between us. And we finally get it, and he coughs back into life.
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Music: Dramatic, high intensity music. [Will coughs as the music swells and Joyce sobs.] Joyce: Oh my god! That’s it, that’s it! [Will coughs.] [Through tears.] Breathe, breathe! There. You got it. Breathe, breathe, come on, come on. Breathe. Good, good, good.
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Bright synth.
david
And it is this truly euphoric moment for all of us, having shot this show for like six months down in Atlanta, all of us away from our families, not knowing what the hell we were making, feeling really isolated and confused and alone. And then having to—you know, resuscitate this poor little boy and then the process. Like, not being able to give it my full weight that I had with the dummy, but to be able to have to do this with this kid was just—it’s hard to describe, but it was a kind of terrifying experience to pour as much of my energy as I could but be as safe as I could to try to get this moment. And with—you know—days as they go, how it just really came up to the wire and everybody was tense, and we knew we wouldn’t get another shot at it. We knew we wouldn’t get another day to shoot it. And it felt like I had so much riding on this particular show in general, with my life having been what it was up until that point—a somewhat dissatisfied actor in film and television wanting to be able to tell so much bigger stories. And then to have, I felt like, my performance have to cram into ten minutes at the end of a long, isolating, desperate shoot. When I think of the word “crazy”, like a maddening day, it felt maddening to have to wander around and shoot shots of us shining flashlights through spores and then have—you know, just like 20 minutes to do the pivotal emotional work that you feel like could be the culmination of something beautiful. Now, I mean, lucky for me like the day ended and the show became an amazing success. But it truly felt at the time like the craziest day of my career.
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Bright, hopeful synth.
jesse
David Harbour on the craziest [censored] day of his entire career. Stranger Things is in its fourth season now, on Netflix. If you’re one of the 20 people who haven’t seen Stranger Things yet, this is your shot! [Music fades out.]
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Thoughtful piano with a steady beat.
jesse
That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye, created from the homes me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California. I actually got out of the house this week! I went to Porter Ranch, deep in the Valley, to go to the 80th birthday party of friend of Bullseye and soul legend, Swamp Dogg. It was great. I got to hang out with Swamp. They’re making a documentary film about him, and they repainted his pool with a giant painting of him riding a rat. I hung out with Vernon Reid, the great guitarist. I met Ira from Yo La Tengo who had been on this show 20 years ago, maybe, and I had never met him in real life. Oh, it was a great time. It was great. Swamp has a new record coming out soon. It’s a bluegrass album, and I could hardly imagine a better 80-year-old psychedelic soul singer to make a bluegrass record than Swamp Dogg. So, keep your eyes peeled. Or your ears, I guess. Our show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson. Our producers are Jesus Ambrosio and Richard Robey. Our production fellow at Maximum Fun is Tabatha Myers. We get booking help from Mara Davis. Our interstitial music is by Dan Wally, also known as DJW. Our theme music is by The Go! Team. It’s called “Huddle Formation”. Thanks to The Go! Team for letting us use it. Thanks to their label, Memphis Industries. Thanks also to Jack Allen in London for recording David Harbour this week. Bullseye is also on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. You can find us in those places, follow us. We share our interviews there. And I think that’s about it. Just remember: all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.
promo
Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
About the show
Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.
Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.
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