Stranger Things: David Harbour hints at Gandalf-like resurrection in ‘bigger’ season 4

The wait for the fourth season of Stranger Things has now stretched to almost two years, but actor David Harbour, who plays Hopper in the Netflix series, has dropped some hints about the upcoming instalment that promises that the wait may well be worth it. 

Talking to Collider during the promotions of his upcoming Black Widow film, Harbour compared Hopper’s journey in Stranger Things to that of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings. 

“It’s my favorite season, in the sense that he’s at his purest, he’s at his most vulnerable, in a sense. He’s been, as we’ve seen, he’s in this Russian prison, so we get to reinvent him in a sense. He gets to have a rebirth from what he had become, and we’d always sort of planned this almost resurrection of when Gandalf dies, Galdalf the Grey re-emerge, and I’m really interested in this resurgence of him. We get to explore a lot of threads in his life that have merely been hinted at that we get to see a lot more of. And there’s some real surprises that you know nothing about that will start to come out in this and play big as the series goes on,” said the actor. 

Further on the upcoming season, which is in its post-production phase, Harbour said, “It’s bigger, that’s the first thing. In scope, in scale, even in the idea that we’re not in Hawkins anymore. We, locale-wise, we’re bigger. We’re introducing new stuff, but we’re also tightening and wrapping up in a certain direction to make it have a clear, clean, specific, and definite ending at some point, which I can’t really talk about."

While the release date of season 4 of Stranger Things is yet to be announced, the makers did drop a trailer in May, hinting that it would also focus on El’s past.