David Harbour on "DTF St. Louis," ASL and "Avengers: Doomsday" - Variety

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In " DTF St. Louis," David Harbour goes quiet.

The 51-year-old New York-born actor plays Floyd, a performance built around four months of daily American Sign Language practice. The work earned him his first Emmy acting nomination since 2017 — and his first in the limited series category, this time as an executive producer through his production company, Bravo Axolotl, the banner he founded in Dec. 2022.

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"I spent about four months before the shoot just daily practice with a woman in New York and also someone in Atlanta, and I got to the point where I could definitely have conversations," Harbour tells Variety. "It’s beautiful. I’d like to pick it up again; I just got real busy and I put it down."

Learning the language, he says, rewired something in his brain. "In French, I’ll listen to the English and then interpret how I say it," he says. "With sign language, you do get to the place where it becomes a different piece of your brain."

For an actor who has made a career out of his physicality, playing a character who is contained and mostly still presented a different kind of challenge — one Harbour says came easier than expected.

"I found things about Floyd very difficult to uncover and figure out, but that was not one of them," he shares. "I’m a big guy and sort of masculine in certain ways, but there are other times when I go home and I’m just by myself, reading a book or playing video games. I’m very introverted. So there’s a lot of that in Floyd. He’s a dreamer, a sweet guy."

One of the performance's signature moments is an interpretive dance during a concert sequence, witnessed by his nominated co-stars Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini — the scene I flagged as the one that makes Harbour a contender. It was shot with remarkable speed.

"On the day, it was very quick. I only shot one take of the complete thing," he recalls. "I was very nervous about the signs. I knew what I was doing, but I had somebody across from me to help me out."

"DTF St. Louis" arrives with 13 Emmy nominations, making it one of the year’s most recognized miniseries. For Harbour, who also served as a producer, the group recognition means more than the solo attention he received during his first Emmy campaign.

"Back then it was pretty singular, focused on you as an actor," he says of his 2017 nominations for "Stranger Things." "Going into this, it’s the show. It’s every single actor. ‘Stranger Things’ wasn’t mine. I was jobbed in," he says. "I feel so proud. It’s my baby."

Reviews have framed Floyd as the role that finally sheds Harbour’s "genre actor" label. Harbour resists the idea that the label was ever a cage or a hurdle to his progress as an artist.

"I’ve always known who I am, because I came to it so late — I was 40 when I hit ‘Stranger Things,’ and at that point you’re a theater actor doing all these roles," he says. "I always knew I had it in me. It was a matter of whether the world would give me the opportunity. And even if the world won’t give me the opportunity, I’ll just do it myself."

Hence the production company.

Harbour recalls shooting a scene with Bateman on "DTF St. Louis," surrounded by crew members he first met on "Stranger Things," who had watched him run around with prop guns as Hopper.

"These are guys who watched me for years be tough-guy Hopper, and there I am dancing around with Bateman, and they’re all applauding me," he says. "I was like, oh, hillbillies like us, we’re OK."

"Stranger Things" ended its five-season, 10-year run earlier this year, and Harbour describes the finish as peaceful.

"We were all sort of ready to move on," he explains. "What we’ll mainly miss is the fan base. These people love it so much that you don’t want to let them down or leave them hanging."