ACTOR David Harbour is enjoying his time in the spotlight pursuing other projects, all while still surviving Netflix’s global phenomenon Stranger Things through its re-energised fourth season.
In his latest project Violent Night, Harbour headlines the hard R-rated Christmas action film as an alcoholic Santa Claus that is forced to recall his days as a Nordic warrior to help save an uber-wealthy family when a band of mercenaries take the latter’s estate hostage.
Harbour remembers being pitched the concept by producer David Leitch and director Tommy Wirkola, the director of Dead Snow.
“I was like, ‘This is ridiculous guys. This is so dumb. What are we talking about?’,” Harbour said before reading the script.
After reading it, he was hooked.
“It has all the action set pieces and it has this kind of Die Hard train to it, but underneath it all, it has this little girl believing in Santa Claus,” Harbour said.
“There's just a lot of deeply funny stuff in I've never seen a movie like this, or a movie that attempts to do what we attempt to do in this movie, which is to make a Christmas movie a kick-ass action John Wick movie. It's insane. So I like that swing.”
Violent Night is expected to be another notch in Harbour’s career resurgence, which had life breathed into it after the first season of Stranger Things, which he initially thought would bomb.
“I had no idea it would blow up the way it did because my expectations in terms of this business have been managed at every step by something failing to live up to my expectations of it.”
“(After reading the script) I was like, ‘This is fantastic. I'm sure no one will watch it.’ It'll be a really niche small audience of people that are die hard like fans. I also didn't think they would cast me, and then they did.”
After Violent Night, Harbour will be reprising his role as Black Widow’s Red Guardian in Marvel’s antihero team-up Thunderbolts in 2024.
