David Kenneth Harbour was born on April 10, 1975, and is an American actor. He has appeared in a number of films including Brokeback Mountain (2005), Awake (2007), Revolutionary Road (2008), State of Play (2009), W.E. (2011), A Walk Among the Tombstones (2014), Black Mass (2015), Suicide Squad (2016), Sleepless (2017), No Sudden Move (2021), and Gran Turismo (2023).
Harbour is particularly well-known for his portrayal of Jim Hopper in the Netflix science fiction series Stranger Things (2016–present). For his role, he received a Critics’ Choice Television Award in 2018, as well as two Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award nomination. In addition,
David Kenneth Harbour was born to Kenneth and Nancy (née Riley) Harbour in White Plains, New York. Both his parents work in real estate, with his mother working in residential and his father in commercial. Harbour attended Byram Hills High School in Armonk, New York, where he went to school with actors Sean Maher and Eyal Podell.
He graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he majored in drama and Italian and was a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. After college, as a young man, Harbour lived in New York City, and he often visited and participated in gambling at underground poker clubs. He even claims that he personally knew the gangster who John Malkovich’s character “Teddy KGB” was based on in the 1998 film Rounders.
David Harbour is well-known for his performances on stage, television, and film. He started his acting career in 1994 performing with The Theater at Monmouth at Cumston Hall in Monmouth, ME, where he acted in Shakespearian productions. In 1999, he made his Broadway debut in the revival of The Rainmaker. He also appeared on television, playing small roles in shows like Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Harbour received a Tony Award nomination in 2005 for his performance in a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
Harbour has appeared in several movies, including Quantum of Solace, Revolutionary Road, and State of Play. He also had a memorable role as a spree killer in a 2009 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Harbour’s other film credits include Brokeback Mountain, The Green Hornet, End of Watch, and Between Us. He had a recurring role as MI6 agent Roger Anderson in the ABC series Pan Am and as Elliot Hirsch in The Newsroom.
In 2014, Harbour played the recurring character of Dr. Reed Akley in the first season of the historical drama series Manhattan. He gained widespread recognition for his role as Chief Jim Hopper in the Netflix science fiction horror series Stranger Things. For that role, he has received several award nominations and won a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
In 2019, Harbour starred as the title character in the superhero reboot film Hellboy. He most recently portrayed Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Black Widow (2021) and will reprise the role in the upcoming Thunderbolts (2025). Harbour also had a starring role in the Neill Blomkamp sports film Gran Turismo (2023) based on the PlayStation video game series of the same name.
Harbour had relationships with Alison Sudol and Julia Stiles. Since 2019, he has been in a relationship with singer Lily Allen. They made their red carpet debut during the 26th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. They married on September 7, 2020, in Las Vegas in a wedding officiated by an Elvis impersonator. The couple share a Brownstone in Brooklyn and worked with the architect Ben Bischoff.
Harbour previously followed several religions, including Catholicism and Buddhism.
