Ever since Stranger Things arrived on Netflix in 2016, folks have been enamoured with David Harbour. While he’s been one of those actors who’ve always been around, you may not have realised it before his turn as Hopper in the Netflix series. That show gave his career a huge boost, and it’s only grown after he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Red Guardian in last year’s Black Widow.
With how fans took to Guardian before and especially after the release of that film, it was inevitable that much like Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova, we’d be seeing him again in something fairly soon. Come D23 this past September, we got our answer: Guardian will be in the main team for the upcoming Thunderbolts movie along with Yelena, Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier, and other fairly recent MCU antagonists like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss’ Contessa.
While that film isn’t out for another few years, Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier recently got a chance to speak with Harbour about it during the press circuit for the actor’s upcoming holiday film, Violent Night. Though Harbour admitted that he hadn’t been given a script yet from screenwriter Eric Pearson (an MCU alum whose previous works include Black Widow), he did say he was told “the arc of the movie and how it functions…and it’s super cool. The idea is really cool.”
The general roster of the MCU Thunderbolts feels strange, and Guardian’s inclusion on the team is by far the oddest, since he hasn’t done anything evil or malicious towards franchise heroes. Even so, Harbour told Gizmodo that the weirdness of it all is part of the point, saying “to throw these characters feels very random.”
“I’ve loved Wyatt [Russell], and Sebastian and Julia’s characters throughout the universe,” he continued. “What [director Jake Schreier] wants to do with Florence’s character is very interesting and how I factor into how we develop our relationship is very interesting. And then when you see what Jake and Eric Pearson is trying to fashion, it’s really clever…So you have this movie that’s, you know, kind of ragtag.”
Beyond that eclectic lineup, he concluded the interview by promising some big things to come for the wider MCU with this new film. “It’ll be funny. it’ll be weird, it’ll be action. And then we’re also going to drop a bomb, which is cool.”
Marvel’s Thunderbolts is expected to hit theatres on July 26, 2024.
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