David Harbour Shares The Secret To His Success — & It’s Not Just His Beard

How did David Harbour become the perfect grizzly wombat-man that he is today? Well, according to Harbour himself, it took "12 years peppered with bouts of depression" as well as some sleep-deprivation and — most importantly — an "infatuation/quest/life purpose of tasting all the cakes."

Harbour divulged this in response to a tweet from the Stranger Things account that included a photo of the actor from 2005. In the photo, Harbour is 30 years old and sans beard — he's but a shell of the man we know today.

However, this was the same year that Harbour was nominated for his role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This was also the year Brokeback Mountain came out — Harbour played a cowboy in Ang Lee's film, so put that in your trivia pipe and smoke it!

Point is, twelve years after the photo was taken, Harbour may be a household name with an impressive Twitter presence, but he's been a formidable talent for well over a decade.

"I've been working as an actor and making over $100,000 a year for a long time. And that's a great life. You pay your rent, you hang out, do plays...it was a dream life already," Harbour explained on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in August. "And so I had just been like, 'I'll just be this guy. I'll be this character actor.'"

In Stranger Things, Harbour plays Chief Jim Hopper, the burly hero of the series. This is a first for Harbour of sorts — he's stepped out the character roles and into the leading man slot, and Harbour seems continually surprised that the public loves him in that role.

"I've always had a thing where I thought that movie stars... I just feel like they're so damn good-looking," Harbour continued. "There's no way you'd put [my] face as the frontman."

And yet, here we are. There's Hopper fan art. There's a Twitter account dedicated to Harbour's dancing. The internet stans for David Harbour, pastry quest and all.