Chief Hopper is now raising a teenager with superpowers and a boyfriend, which is bringing him closer to Joyce but isn’t helping with his health.
“It thrusts him into a discussion with Joyce [Winona Ryder]. She’s able to offer me some advice on how to deal with being a single parent and how to, like, you know, stop being so damn controlling,” David Harbour told EW.
It also seems that parenthood has softened him, in a way.
“This season, Hopper does a lot of really big, like, action-y things,” he said. “But he’s fatter than you’ve ever seen him and less capable of hurting people, but a little more capable because he’s just like a big elephant.”
“I mean, Hopper, in season two kinda became more of a father and he got a little softer in a way that was great, kinda opened him up and we’re gonna get back to a little bit of the squash-buckling Jim Hopper from season one where he was going around punching people, which I think we missed,” Harbour told us last year. “So that’s very gratifying to play too but along with his new father thing that he has with Eleven, it’s great.”