One thing is clear about the new Hellboy reboot from director Neil Marshall: its star David Harbour really fucking loves playing Hellboy.
It’s been a long day for the actor, who typically suits up as “Big Red” in the make-up chair first thing in the morning, a process that takes under two hours, and that’s where he remains for most of the day, under heavy prosthetics. Late one Monday, back in November 2017, filming had wrapped for the day, the last few stragglers were closing down the Bulgarian fort for the night, and Harbour went back in the make-up chair for the de-rig routine.
“It was supposed to take not this long but you can’t rush genius,” Harbour says, still smiling.
By the time he finally re-emerges out of costume to speak with a group of press, there is one thing that remains: his red-painted left hand.
“The de-rig process is, like, half an hour, but I leave this lovely thing to wander around Bulgaria,” he laughs. “I look like either David Bowie or a burn victim, the nail polish and everything. This is the only piece of my flesh that’s actually on camera” — in reference to the prosthetic stone hand that covers his right hand and the body suit that covers everything else. “They de-rig me with all the stuff and then they’re like, ‘Do you want to take this off?’ I’m like, ‘No, fuck it! I’m in Bulgaria. I just sleep anyway and eat shopska salads. So fuck it!’”
Playing Hellboy has done quite the number on Harbour’s vocabulary. Each remark typically comes with a “fuck” or a “shit.” To be fair, it’s difficult not to cuss a bit when you’re pretending to slaughter giants in a big-budget R-rated comic book fantasy. It also helps distinguish Harbour’s Hellboy from Ron Perlman’s turn in the Guillermo del Toro films.
In revisiting Hellboy for a new reboot, 11 years since the release of Del Toro’s The Golden Army, Marshall and the producers agreed to do something more dark and
“gnarly” — but still with bursts of comedy, like watching Harbour scream at ghosts for four minutes.
In one of his first sit-downs with journalists on the film’s Bulgarian set, Harbour — still with his red-painted left hand — explained the approach to Hellboy, extracting elements from the comics, Hellboy’s sexual history, getting into hellspawn shape for practical stunts, and the seeming presence of Lobster Johnson, a crime-fighting pulp vigilante idolized by Hellboy in the comics.
Yes, a lot of “fuck”s and “shit”s ensued.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you take us back to the beginning? What was your first conversation and where did it evolve from there?
DAVID HARBOUR: We were shooting the second season of Stranger Things. I think it was very early in the shooting process and I got a call from my agents just saying, ‘They want to remake Hellboy and they want you to be the new Hellboy and here’s the script.' The movie wasn’t completely greenlit, we didn’t have a studio, but [producers] Lloyd Levin and Larry Gordon had this script. They wanted to redo the whole thing and they had Neil Marshall at that point and they were all very keen on me doing it. They sent [the script] to me and I was very confused and terrified at that prospect and excited. I mean, who the fuck am I? I’ve been a character guy for years doing these little things. Stranger Things came out and I think that Neil, Lloyd, and [Hellboy creator] Mike Mignola, I guess, all watched it around that first month. I think they all called each other and were like, “Wouldn’t David Harbour be a great Hellboy?” That’s very flattering and very horrifying to think that I would be this angry demon, but it seems to fit. I read a very early draft of the script and it was not terrible, and I was really excited about that. The script has gone through a lot of iterations, we’ve done a lot of work on it. The superhero mythos is so big in our culture now and I, of course, want to be a part of that.
I almost consider it like, the Greeks had Achilles and Agamemnon, we have Captain America and Iron Man. It’s the same shit, right? But whereas maybe Aeschylus and Sophocles were writing the Avengers movies, here you have Euripedes coming in with this darker version of Elektra or something that is nastier and gnarlier. When I read the script, that’s what excited me. It wasn’t like those Marvel movies that we see. It was very different but it had a very compelling story and it was very in line with the graphic novels that I had been introduced to in my early 20s. Again, there are exceptions. Our inspirations are Logan, Deadpool, and the Christopher Nolan Batman universe.
I went back and forth for a long time on it because part of the trepidation was those films have a rabid fan base, the Guillermo del Toro ones, and certainly Ron Perlman did a terrific job and is a great actor. I was scared people would feel like it was a fuck you to those guys and what they've done. I was nervous about that. In terms of the reimagining, I sort of hate the term “reboot" 'cause I've seen a million dudes play Hamlet and I love everybody's take on that particular character and they bring out something unique. So my whole thing is, we’re not gonna try to compete with what those guys did. We’re not gonna even play in that ballpark. We're gonna do something just completely different and we're gonna highlight a different aspect of this guy. I can't do what Ron Perlman does. I think he's a genius at what he does — this very dry, machismo thing. In terms of approaching the character, I have to do it my own way. It has to be totally different and it has to be something that I, first of all, am drawn to and [is] , secondly, something that I can excel at as an actor. The fact that they were really into that and they wanted to bring new life and a wildly different take on that, I was like, “Alright then, I’m in. This sounds really great.”
What is that take?
HARBOUR: The terrible version of it is angsty and the great version of it is tortured. In the original Hellboy movies, I feel like he's very much a guy who has a sense of humor who goes about his job and does his thing and deals with the demons and the evil in the world. In our movie, he’s very much dealing with his own being ostracized from society. There’s kind of a Frankenstein element to it. There’s a lot more self-hatred. Although those [Del Toro] movies did explore a certain aspect of that, ours is just a lot darker in terms of a character piece, who he is. He's a much more tortured guy who, in the end, has to do the right thing. He is destined to be the beast of the apocalypse and one of our goals is to justify the temptations of that destiny in terms of the creation of a world where, as a demon, he might be accepted. As a monster he might be accepted, [but] he doesn’t feel [that] in this world.
One of the interesting things to me about the Guillermo del Toro films was that he had a love interest, right? And she was a fire-starter, but I just think that Hellboy probably can’t have sex with a human being because it would probably end disastrously because of his demonic parts. So I just feel like what I wanted to explore was that loneliness and the temptations of, if you do create a darker world as the beast of the apocalypse, you can have sex, you can have a girlfriend, you can have a life, but to live in the human world and protect humanity, you have to sacrifice some of your nature — and your actual nature as opposed to this concept of destiny. Your actual nature gets somewhat sacrificed.
There was a movie that I loved years ago that Phil Hoffman made called Owning Mahowny, a little indie movie about a guy who’s a mid-level Canadian banker and he starts gambling and he goes to Vegas and eventually he’s playing $70,000 hands and Bacharach and he’s taking all these loans out. Eventually the feds catch him and they say to him, “What was the greatest joy, on a scale of 1-10, you felt gambling?” And he said, “10.” And they were like, “What is the greatest joy you ever felt doing anything other than gambling — sex, food, whatever?” And he was like, “2.” And he was like, “So you’ll have to live with it at 2 for the rest of your life.” And he was like, "I’m okay with that.” There’s something about that thematic that I find is somewhat different in terms of Hellboy’s struggle.
There’s a lot more drama dynamic that Ian McShane brings as well. [Hellboy’s adopted human father] Broom is a very differently structured character in our piece, and Hellboy’s relationship with Broom is very different. On the other side, Guillermo del Toro created this fantastic, very colorful world. And our world is created by Neil Marshall. It’s a darker, more gothic horror world. And it’s brutal in terms of the fights. I’ve never had to do such intense stunt work in my whole life. The fights are crazy. [Stunt coordinator] Markos [Rounthwaite] sculpted all of these incredible fights, and they’re bloody and there’s really the sense you’re actually killing things — even if they are giants or monsters or whatever — that you’re chopping their heads off, you’re bathing in their blood, and you’re feeling the complex feelings of actually cutting the heart out of another thing. We’re taking the time to deal with that, the fact that Hellboy is a killer. He’s, truly, a weapon. And I think we spent a little more time on that, as well.
In terms of the colors and the look of it, you guys have seen one image at least, because I leaked something on Twitter that I apparently shouldn’t have done. But you’ve seen a couple images of Hellboy on social media aspects. He’s darker. He’s more muscular. He’s more intense. He’s more angular. The color palette is, in my mind, a little more to the comics. We bathe it in a lot of blue light, a lot of yellow light, and the color itself of the suit. He’s the only red object in the frame a lot of times. So it has an aesthetic that is really interesting to me, and feels a little more of the Mignola comic than the Guillermo del Toro fantastic universe. In that way, it’s different… Yeah, I’ve forgotten the question.
Are Hellboy and [Sasha Lane’s] Alice [Managhan] not an item in the movie?
HARBOUR: It’s an avuncular relationship. It’s funny because, in an earlier draft, there was the temptation to do that, and I was very adamant to the fact that Hellboy cannot have sex with human women. I don’t want that to ever be an issue, and I want it to be known for him, whereas there is this Blood Queen Witch in the movie, right? So there is a world that he can exist sexually in, but it is not in our human universe. Alice is, even though she has sort of a witchcraft thing to her, she is a human being. He would never.
Do they still have the same backstory that they have in the comic book? When you see her as a little baby…
HARBOUR: Yes, yes. The whole Gru and that sort of thing? Yeah.
Can you talk about what the process was like meeting Mike Mignola and fleshing out the character?
HARBOUR: We talked a lot early on when I was working on it. I would just like text him all the time random questions. He told me that he talked a lot about his dad, that Hellboy was a combination of him and his dad, that his dad was this working class… I forget what actual job he had, but some like longshoreman type guy. This rugged kind of job mentality was very much his dad, but the humor of Hellboy was much more Mike. Mike is a weird kind of funny dude, like I am a weird, funny dude.
The funny thing about a comic is you have a framework or a structure where characters are doing things, they’re taking actions. It’s almost like ballet or something. You’re thrust into a framework of like, I am hitting these things. Hellboy looks a certain way, he sounds a certain way. It’s not something where when I read something like Chief Hopper on the page, I’m able to interpretively give you that. We don’t have a Chief Hopper comic, right? But with Hellboy, we have a comic. He does certain things, he has certain gestures, he has certain looks. I studied all the comics and I have a whole book with just certain things that he does, jaw things that he does and different gestures and different ways he moves his body, ways he carries himself. Part of my job was to have that framework structure, but then for me to go deeper, I approached it from the outside in, which is something I rarely do, but it was very broadening as an artist for me, because now you have a framework and now you have to go back in and you have to find these things, where they’re justified in a person’s psyche. Even though he’s a demon, I have to consider him human. He’s half-human, but I have to consider him psychologically like a human.
One of the big questions I had was, when did he start shaving his horns? How old was he? I know he’s immortal or whatever, but he was spawned when he was like a baby. He’s 2 or 3 and he ages up in the movie. At what point was he with Broom and he was like, “You know what? I’m going to start chopping these things off and I’m going to start sanding them down because I’m embarrassed”?
Did you ask Mike that?
HARBOUR: I did, yeah. He didn’t really have an answer.
[A journalist in the room explains to Harbour it’s explained in the comics.]
It’s in the books.
HARBOUR: Is it?
In B.P.R.D. 1948.
HARBOUR: Oh Jesus Christ. What does it say? How old was he?
He’s like 5 or 6.
HARBOUR:Oh damn it! Okay. I have him doing it a little later, but you don’t see it in the movie. It’s just in my head. Goddamn! Amazing!
The other thing that we did talk about was the love of Lobster Johnson. One of the interesting things even in terms of coming up with vocally the way he speaks, Broom is a brit, he’s raised by Broom, but he talks like a guy from New York. Part of that was that he traveled all over the world. He speaks Spanish, he speaks all these different languages. I talked to a language coach about this, and he was talking about how kids learn dialects from the people that they grow up with. They don’t learn dialects from their parents. So if you have a Spanish mother or something and you grow up in the United States, you speak like an American kid. So part of the thing for me in terms of finding his voice was that he idolized Lobster Johnson. In my mind, even the trench coat plays into this idea of this James Cagney sort of [thing]. He was spawned in ’45 or something, right? So I imagined him in the ’50s, growing up with these black-and-white movies of Double Indemnity. Double Indemnity’s probably before that, but like, men who were private eyes and who went out and solved things.
In terms of being a demon, one of the things he wants to do is fit in. He wants to be like a private eye who goes and solves crimes, and he is the best B.P.R.D. agent. He’s the best paranormal detective the world has ever seen. He takes great pride in his job and he takes great pride in this persona, and that persona is a lot based on his favorite superhero, Lobster Johnson.
So he gets name-checked in the movie?
HARBOUR: Lobster? … There are certain things I’m not supposed to talk about, but Lobster Johnson factored into my thought process a great deal. How’s that for an answer? Write that in your blogs, damn it! … They can’t talk to me. They shouldn’t let me do shit like this. You’ve seen the shit with Stranger Things, right? Every article is like, “David Harbour reveals the entire season of Stranger Things!” Every article. So I’m not gonna be that guy. I read the comics. Lobster Johnson is a big deal to Hellboy. He dresses up like him for Halloween. So that factors into my psychological process.
Sequel potential. Has that informed your performance?
HARBOUR: If we make money, if people come see the movie. No, I don’t like to think like that. It’s one of the things that I read critically about The Mummy, this idea that you spend half the movie setting up a universe as opposed to just making the greatest movie you possibly can. Then if people want to see more of it, sure, we can do more of them. But we’re not going to dole out little snippets of what you’re going to see later. We’re just going to make one movie that’s awesome, and then if people love that movie, then we’ll make more of them. But there is no doling out of a universe. We’re just trying to make the best Hellboy movie you’ve ever seen, and that’s all we want to do.
In terms of the stunts, can you talk a little bit more about that and why it was particularly challenging?
HARBOUR: I’m wildly out of shape, and I don’t like doing things physically except sitting on the couch and eating donuts.
No, I did do training before. After we wrapped on season 2 [of Stranger Things], I did actually do like 10 weeks of intense power training and stuff. I started to eat a lot because the prosthetics are fitted to my body, so I couldn’t change my body, but I did get a lot stronger and a lot more limber and a lot more powerful. I actually did a lot of work beforehand to get strong for the shit that I had to do. But even when I showed up here, the shit that I had to do, I was like, “Holy shit! This is beyond what I thought I would have to do.”
I have two stunt doubles and a horse-riding double who were terrific, And they do the really hard stuff. I don’t have any machismo around doing my own stunts. If you can put the guy in, he’s better at it than I am. What was really interesting — and I’ve been doing a lot of work with second unit, too — is that a lot of it is not CGI. A lot of it is practical. The whole suit is practical, the whole look is practical, and a lot of these fights are practical. There’s some bigger spectacle things that are going to have to be CGI, but even when they do that, most of the running around that I’m doing is me. One of the things I like about him is that he’s a really messy fighter. This is one of the things that I actually talked to Mike about. I talked about his belt that he wears, because he wears this belt that has these patches and I was like, “What’s in those fuckin’ things?” And he’s like, “Well, he’s a paranormal detective, right? So he’s got to show up and fight vampires and witches or whatever. So he’s got like garlic and silver bullets and all kinds of shit.” But he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. So he’ll throw a bunch of garlic on somebody and then he’ll be like, “That didn’t work!” And then he just goes in and eventually he knows that he’ll just have to knock somebody out.
In that way, I wanted him to be strong, but I didn’t want him to be a trained MMA guy. He doesn’t have a lot of training as a fighter. He’s just big and strong and scary and almost like a pub brawler. So one of the things about the fights that have been really fun is that he messes up a lot. We’ll go in and the stunt guys will do it perfectly, and then I’ll come in and we’ll get tighter stuff where I’ll just be slipping and falling and coughing up shit. So it has a real feel to it that’s very very messy.
Part of the thing that I have problems with in the CGI world that we live in now is things feel very inconsequential, like a car blows up on a guy and then he runs up a wall and then he falls back on the car. You’re just like, “What’d that do to your spine, man?” Even though [Hellboy] does have tremendous regenerative powers and he’s a lot stronger, we have moments where it hurts. That’s one of the fun things about Hellboy, he does have those moments where it’s like, “Oh fuck. It hurts my spine and my knees are going.” I have a toe issue where my toe was fucked up because I banged it. I was like, “This is kind of great!” After one of these fights, Hellboy’s toe or his hoof is just completely messed up. Incorporating these elements of a guy who fights like hell, but also is very messy was very fun. It’s also more taxing than just doing the fights because you’re actually having to slip and fall and spring back up. But it’s been exciting because Markos is very much a character guy and the fights are very character-based. They’re not just spectacular fights. They’re very much Hellboy fights, which means moments of real grandeur and spectacular-ness, and moments of “oh crap,” moments of silliness. So hopefully, we find the balance between those two.
Are you ambidextrous now because you can’t really use your right hand?
HARBOUR: That’s actually a real fucking problem. The actual hand that we use, we have a number of them and they are practical and the fingers move. I have control and malleability of them. So I can do things with them. It’s not a prop. It does extend out to here, so it’s hard to scratch your face and do certain things because it actually extends further out. But I can grab shit. I can do a lot with it. I can punch with it, but occasionally it will come up where certain things will happen and I’m like, “God damn it!” I remember we had this day on set the other day where I got the hand I got the fuckin’ thing, I got the body, and then I got the tail too. I was slumped over this thing and I was like, “Fuck! I’m dealing with the hand and now my tail doesn’t look right? Fuck you guys.” It’s a lot to deal with. The tail is a pain in the ass, too. Having a tail sounds better than it is. In reality you don’t really want it. I know you all think you want a tail, you don’t want a tail.
Going back to the hooves… I saw the hooves in the shop.
HARBOUR: You saw the hooves! You revealed the hooves?! Oh my God.
Who’s decision was it to have them in the movie?
HARBOUR: There were a couple things I can’t tell you that I know fans really want to see, which we put in the movie. One of them that I can tell you about, clearly, is the hooves. The hooves were a big deal to me, too. The one thing that we can’t do that I really did want to do, but we can’t do is he’s in shorts [in the comics], right? But we didn’t put him in shorts because the actual time that that requires means we couldn’t actually shoot the fuckin’ movie or it would have to be all CG and you don’t want that… So, yes, we do hooves and body and all this stuff is practical. even the yellow eyes. Maybe if we make a billion dollars we’ll put him in shorts in the next one.
For more of our Hellboy set visit coverage, peruse the links below:
- ‘Hellboy’ Set Vist: 47 Things to Know About Neil Marshall’s Dark, “Grounded” Reboot
- How ‘Hellboy’ Rebooted the Franchise Without Guillermo del Toro or Ron Perlman
- 'Hellboy' Producer on the Daimio Whitewashing Controversy: "We Lost Track"