Many fans had mixed feelings when it was announced that the long-awaited Hellboy 3 from Guillermo Del Toro wasn’t happening, with the franchise being rebooted instead. Ron Perlman’s version was beloved by aficionados of Mike Mignola’s comics and it’s a real shame that we didn’t get to see him reprise the role for a third time. Still, if you’re someone who’s on the fence about the reboot, at least the actor’s successor, David Harbour, shares Perlman’s love for the titular hellish hero.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, the Stranger Things star talked about how he got into Hellboy during his twenties.
“I did read some comics, but I was not a huge comic guy. I got into graphic novels later on in my life. In my twenties, my friends introduced me to some darker graphic novels, things like Watchmen and Hellboy. The comics were not really my thing. I was a little more into cartoons and Dungeons & Dragons and like He-Man and Thundercats. Those cartoons and stuff.”
Despite not being a big comic book reader, Harbour went on to talk about why he loves the Hellboy comics.
“I really do think those Mike Mignola Hellboy comics are so beautiful and he’s such a hero for America that we live in today. I definitely think Hellboy is an antihero. He was kind of born into it. It wasn’t something like Batman where he chooses to go and fight crime. He was just born this weird half-demon spawned by Nazi occultists and saved by these dudes who tried to raise him right. For him, it’s a sense of discovery. His actual destiny as a ‘hero’ is to end the world. He is the beast of the apocalypse. So, in a way, his struggle to be a superhero is to just not do the thing that he’s destined to do.”
It’s interesting that Harbour mentions the character being the Beast of the Apocalypse. Perlman and Del Toro have often spoken about that aspect of Hellboy in the past, promising that Hellboy 3 would have seen his destiny play out. It looks like the reboot, titled Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen, might be inspired by their ideas then and show us the hero facing – and presumably trying to avert – his dark fate.
Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen is directed by Neil Marshall and will land in theatres in 2018.