Over the first 16 years of David Harbour ’s acting career, he built a successful resume of Broadway theater (in productions like “The Invention of Love,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “The Coast of Utopia”) and supporting roles in TV (“Pan Am,” “The Newsroom”) and film (“Quantum of Solace,” “State of Play,” “The Equalizer”).

“I really enjoyed being No. 7 on a call sheet of, like, a Denzel Washington action movie, and also being leads in plays at the Public Theater in New York,” he says. “It was a lovely life, a fantastic life, a one-bedroom-rental-in-the-East-Village life.”

Then, at 41, Harbour was cast in “ Stranger Things ” as Hawkins, Indiana, police chief Jim Hopper — the only adult male lead (opposite Winona Ryder’s Joyce Byers) on a show populated almost entirely with yo

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