Before his return as Jim Hopper in the third season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, David Harbour is set to take on the role of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in the upcoming big screen reboot of the comic book hero, and the actor has been chatting to Empire about the new film and his character’s “Shakespearean” story.
“It’s a classically complicated hero,” states Harbour. “He’s a creature that was meant to bring about the end of the world, and he just sort of wants to be a good guy. He’s got that complexity to him. He’s also a monster who lives among human beings, so he’s in a sense fighting for human beings against his fellow monsters, and yet the humans hate him because they fear him and they think he’s weird looking and everything.”
“He has a heart that’s really good and with a lot of this crusted-over stuff,” he continues. “What I’m dealing with in Hellboy is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. It’s very Shakespearean. It’s demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who’s trapped in horrible circumstances who’s just trying to be a good guy.”
SEE ALSO: New Hellboy won’t be like other superhero movies, says Mike Mignola
Hellboy is set for release on January 11th 2019, and is directed by Neil Marshall (Game of Thrones), with Stranger Things star David Harbour taking on the lead role alongside Ian McShane (American Gods) as Professor Broom, Sasha Lane (American Honey) as Alice Monaghan, Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil) as the Queen of Blood, Daniel Dae Kim (Hawaii Five-O) as Major Ben Daimio and Penelope Mitchell (The Vampire Diaries) as Ganeida.
