Inside David Harbour and Millie Bobby Brown’s ‘Raw and Real’ Relationship

There is more than a decade of history between Stranger Things costars Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour.

The actors met on the set of the hit Netflix series, which premiered in 2016, when Brown, now 21, was just 12 years old. In the show, Harbour, 50, plays Jim Hopper, the adoptive father of Brown’s Eleven, and their relationship off-camera has largely paralleled the parental dynamic they share onscreen.

The Daily Mail recently reported that Brown filed a “bullying and harassment claim” against Harbour before filming on season 5 began, which led to a “months”-long investigation into what a source said was “pages and pages of accusations” against Harbour.

The formal complaint did not include any allegations of sexual misconduct, but the outlet noted that Brown had a representative with her while the show’s fifth and final season filmed.

Reps for Netflix, Harbour and Brown have not responded to requests from PEOPLE for comment.

In 2020, Harbour described his relationship with Brown and the other young costars — Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin and Sadie Sink — as “parental” in the early days of making the show.

He told PEOPLE that he initially wanted to “preserve a lot of the character of Hopper off-screen for these kids because I wanted their performances to be as rich as possible,” so he tried to be more stern and serious, like his character was.

“But then as the seasons go on, you just become like a family, and my sort of soft heart gets exposed, and they start to be able to not really take me seriously anymore.”

The dynamic has ended up having “more of a mentor feel,” Harbour said.

With Brown in particular, the parental urges are something Harbour has often talked about. “Millie and I have always had sort of a special relationship because I knew her when she was so young. I knew her before any of this big fame hit,” he said on a podcast in 2021. “I have a real protective feeling for her. I have a real, like, worry.”

“I worry about her and the fame and all that she has to struggle with. And I’ve just always felt this kind of deep fatherly affection for her,” he said.

That worry is something that he also emphasized in 2018, when, after collecting a win at the Critics’ Choice Awards for his role in Stranger Things, he said of Brown, “I think she’s in the crosshairs of something extremely dangerous that nobody seems to be paying attention to.”

“As someone who gets this famous and still has a brain that is not fully developed, [this] is an extremely difficult thing to navigate, and I hope that she gets the help that she needs. I know that I try to protect her as much as I can,” Harbour said.

Despite his concern for her growing up in the spotlight, he said that his “hope” for his costar is: “I want her to be an artist who, when I’m in the nursing home, she can bring me her Oscars.”

Brown, for her part, has similarly described her real-life relationship with Harbour as parental.

“Winona Ryder and David Harbour are like my parents,” she said during a panel in 2018, per Variety. “On set, they’re like, ‘Stop running, what are you eating, why are you eating that?’”

She mentioned that Harbour was specifically protective over her romantic life. “David is like, ‘Another boy?’” she told the outlet.

In 2018, Brown also opened up about how her relationship with Harbour evolved as their characters did. “We went through so many different emotions… we get angry at each other, we are like father and daughter,” the then-14-year-old actress told the crowd at PaleyFest in Los Angeles, according to Refinery29.

“We got angry at each other,” Brown continued, adding that she and Harbour “would express our feelings on and off the set, and… those scenes were so raw and real that the reward is the scenes.”

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In a recent interview for Empire Magazine, Brown said that she and Harbour “connected on another level” from the get-go while making the show.

“He always looked out for me and I always annoyed him like a daughter or younger sister,” she told the outlet, per a fan account. “I was always trying to climb all over him and he was always rolling his eyes and laughing at me. I think that’s kind of how the El and Hopper relationship really started to develop in the show — it was mirroring our actual lives and our actual relationship.”