There’s a back-and-forth within the r/Television subreddit about the show DTF St. Louis, more specifically about the performance of David Harbour, who plays Floyd Smernitch in the HBO limited series. The conversation does not involve quips about whether or not Harbour was the right man for the job or whether or not he played any particular scene too hot or too cold, but rather, about which line, which scene, which moment will be the one that wins him the Emmy.

Will it be his heartbreaking ASL goodbye to Richard (Arlan Ruf) in the finale? Or perhaps his hilarious dance scene to Lil Mama’s “Lipgloss” earlier in the series? Or maybe it’s the moment that Harbour earnestly kisses a quirky but endearing man (Peter Sarsgaard) just to be kind and accommodating. Which scene wins out over the rest as his crowning glory? To tell you the truth, I think it’s all of it.

Nominated in the Supporting Actor in a Limited Series category at the 78th Primetime Emmy Awards, Harbour is hoping to bring home his first win after two previous nominations for playing Jim Hopper in Stranger Things. It’s a hope that feels well within reach for the 51-year-old actor, who has already won a Gotham Award for the role and was recently nominated for the Individual Achievement in Drama category at the Television Critics Association Awards, a pool that consists of just nine other performers from shows like Industry, Pluribus, and The Pitt.

When you ask Harbour about what this nomination means to him and why he thinks the show — which raked in more than a dozen noms, including nods for Jason Bateman, Linda Cardellini, and series creator Steve Conrad — has hit home with so many people, he can’t help but feel an enormous amount of gratitude for every viewer, voter, and supporter who has resonated with what they were trying to say and do with DTF.

“People are like, ‘Are you excited you got nominated?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m okay, but I’m really excited that we have 13 nominations.’ I mean, it feels like your babies just got into a good college or something. It’s just really exciting that people embraced the show,” Harbour shares with DECIDER in an interview over Zoom. “We knew the show had such a delicate tone and it might not be for everybody. I was even talking to Jason, we were shooting and we were talking about shows that have really broad-based appeal, and then shows like this that are really very niche, and I was like, ‘I think we cracked it in a way that it has broader appeal.’”

It’s no surprise that the actor feels an overwhelming sense of pride in the show’s success; Harbour and Conrad have been in development on the series since early 2022. Now, some four years later, he and the entire team are staring at prospective wins across a handful of categories, including the coveted Outstanding Limited/Anthology Series award. For Harbour, though, a piece of hardware would be a great way to wind down a truly remarkable year — see the ending of Stranger Things and the upcoming Avengers Doomsday — but as far as he’s concerned, the show has already rewarded him in so, so many ways.

“I think people want shows about whatever DTF is about and that, to me, feels just so gratifying,” he says.

Check out DECIDER’s full Emmy FYC interview with Harbour below.

DECIDER: David, what a crazy year this has been for you. Between the Emmy nominations and the closing of the book on Stranger Things and then also going into the success of DTF St. Louis and the prep for Doomsday. What is this stage in your career and your life feeling like at the moment?

DAVID HARBOUR: I mean, it’s really wonderful. I think at the tip of the spear is DTF. I just love it so much, I’m so proud of it. I’m happy that people embraced it. I’m also happy that they’ve embraced me being a different character. So often you get stuck in these things and you think like, “Oh, I don’t know,” and then you take the swing, and people have been so gracious about it. It’s allowed me to sort of open up other ideas for work. I’m just so excited to feel a bigger ownership of the stories that I tell as well, like DTF I produced and been developing for four years, and I just, I really wanna tell stories more in a more gestalt fashion than just being jobbed in as an actor.

And because you spent so much time developing it — and maybe this is not the right way to phrase this — does it feel different getting this nomination this time around for DTF than it did for the first two times with Stranger Things?

Yeah, I’m cheating because I worked on it for four years; I’m using performance-enhancing drugs [laughs]. I love Stranger Things and not to take anything away from Stranger Things, but it’s not mine; it’s the Duffers’ and Netflix. We’re jobbed in and doing our best and it’s great, but this, DTF, really does feel like it’s [mine]. Obviously Steve [Conrad] created the world — he’s the genius really behind it — but I was there the whole way sort of helping, giving notes, helping people get back to work, all kinds of stuff. So yeah, it feels special.

I can’t even imagine the day that the Emmy nominations came out because, I think to some degree, we were all expecting you and Jason [Bateman] and Linda [Cardellini]. But then Richard [Jenkins] gets nominated, Joy [Sunday] gets nominated, Steve gets nominated for writing and directing; what was the reaction amongst this family?

To me, again, it’s the joy. People are like, “Are you excited you got nominated?” I’m like, “I’m okay, but I’m really excited that we have 13 nominations.” I mean, it feels like your babies just got into a good college or something. It’s just really exciting that people embraced the show. I think we were all, as we were making it, we knew the show had such a delicate tone and it might not be for everybody. I was even talking to Jason, we were shooting and we were talking about shows that have really broad-based appeal, and then shows like this that are really very niche and I was like, “I think we cracked it in a way that it has broader appeal.” I think people want shows about whatever DTF is about and that, to me, feels just so gratifying.

And, in your own words, what is DTF St. Louis about? What do you think resonated and resulted in 13 Emmy nominations?

People say it’s dark and it is sad, but I actually think it is the ultimate comfort show. I think what it does is it takes your expectations of a show, like a genre, which is suburban noir, which is that people are on a sex app and they’re like, you know, murdering each other and they are like betraying each other and all this stuff, and it deconstructs that. “Actually, the sex is just like, ‘I kissed a guy because I wanted to be nice.’ And then the murder is not really a murder anyway.” I think it really gets to the heart of the fact that people are good, good, well-intentioned beings in general, and that we’re put in these narratives that are incorrect. And I think that that’s very comforting. And I think we start to see the three-dimensionality of these people and their hopes and their wants and their dreams. There’s a real comfort in the fact that human beings are human and there’s so much common ground and that the real tragedy is just the constructs around us.

It almost feels like if you ignore the last episode and the heartbreak of the last episode, it could have a certain Gilmore Girls appeal…

[Laughs] The Gilmore Girls never rapped on recumbent bikes, let’s be honest.

Do you look back on that scene now and go, “We were just doing the whole damn thing.”

I remember shooting that and saying to Steve, every take we did — cause we’d do a couple of different things — every single take I’d go, “You know, HBO is going to cut this.” Then he was like, “No, they’re not.” I was like, “Yes, they are; there’s no way this goes on HBO, man.” The other night that was Amazing was when the stunt double showed up for the pommel horse. And I was like, “That was incredible.”

So much of the show is incredible, including the complexities of this character and this performance. Talk to me about the idiosyncracies and traits of Floyd you were intent on driving home.

To be honest, it was like a bit of a push-pull with me because I have my own fears. I remember two years into the project thinking, “This is gonna be a nightmare, it’s like a guy with a weird dick who’s a failure and all this, it’s gonna be a career-ender. ” You do have somewhat of that narcissism carry with you of like, “Well, is he good at anything?” But I think that as we worked on it further and further, what I started to see was that, you know, the fascinating thing about Floyd is this truly good heart that comes out in the weirdest ways. Even like kissing Peter [Sarsgaard’s character] and the neuroticism about whether or not he thinks that was real and, you know, thinking about it at night and his little bird heart and all these moments where you start to realize, “This guy, he’s a mess, but he really cares.” There’s something so beautiful about him in that way. The other thing that was really important was like the physical stuff. I love the idea that he was a Playgirl model and then feels guilt and shame about what his body has become, but finds a way into the physicality with ASL. Like his body becomes his hands and this way of expression, but that’s rejected by his wife.

But that’s how it gets to the point where it’s like, “maybe a man’s erection will give him the validation that he needs.” Those speeches about boners and the basketball court and stuff are so incredible. I was constantly going like, “Let’s look for originality” — and Steve is just happy to give it in heaps —or “let’s look for these sort of twisted ways of goodness whereby a character searches for like what’s biological and what’s societal, like what civilization needs and what’s just purely biological. And I think it’s that tension that kind of ruins him in the end, but there are just so many dense themes that are in Steve’s writing inherently that we would talk about and come up with. And in its essence, I guess the most important thing about Floyd is that he just has a really good heart. And I think those people are valuable in this world.

Another key piece of Floyd is his physicality and the work you put into this aspect of him. I read that you felt like the bodysuit you wore made you feel like you could be free in this character; why do you think that is?

I think that anytime — like acting in general — anytime you wear a mask, I think it allows you to express what you really feel in a way. I’m sort of not big on the idea of a self in general, I’m kind of a bit Buddhist around that. We agreed to rigidly define the idea of self, whereas we’re just a process, like, I was a little boy and I’m just kind of growing. So I think the more you can let go of the self through a mask, the more it can be like, “I feel things like this.” I think when you have more of a mask — and that belly was a mask — it really allowed me to be free.

I love the idea of all of us just being a process. I think I’m having an ego death as we speak.

Good, that’s great. Congrats [laughs].

You fleshed out this character so much, as the “process” of Floyd, did you ever envision his big life moments or the things that led him to where we see him in the story alongside Carol and Clark?

The biggest things for me are cornerstones of the story, which are his Playgirl shoot. Clearly, he brings it with him to this “special” night of his life, he crosses out its face as he’s dying, he really did fancy himself heroic in the cheesiest of ways. The marriage to Carol’s obviously a huge moment. He had the fortune teller wife before and really was more like the marriage to Carol. And then I think the day of the ASL, again, is huge. When he discovers ASL and her rejection of that, I think, causes the rift. That’s the real complex thing about the story, which I love, is that he understands her need for security and money and his success, and she understands his need for meaning. But they don’t value them. And I think that’s fundamentally incompatible in a marriage if the values are different and I think it hurts because they have a lot of love for each other but I think it erodes the foundation of what they could have been. And that’s when the seeking, I think, starts subconsciously of like, “How can I have that validation?” And he finds it in Jason’s character.

I feel like we see so much of Floyd through the external validation that he looks for from Carol and from Richard in particular, too. Talk to me about finding that dynamic with Linda and Arlan [Ruf].

It was pretty intuitive. I was intimately involved in casting Linda and Arlan, so that was great because they were amazing […] So when we got to set, you know Linda is just naturally like a gracious, loving person. She taught me so much about the role. She taught us so much about this marriage in a sense. There were times when I wanted to play a scene a little hotter and she would like always play it with this care underneath it, even though it was like negative or whatever, and I was very interested in that — that she was bringing so much love to the two of them. I thought Arlan was just such a little unique creature. I think he’s a really good actor, but he’s such a unique creature. He plays a lot of baseball and I talked to him about his baseball teams and stuff, but he had this quality where you’re not sure that kid’s going to be OK. And that was really important to me. Floyd really needs to make this kid okay and then when he knows at the end that he’s ruined him again, he doesn’t know what to do; it kills me. With Jason, it was just like meeting a brother […] There wasn’t very much talk about the work that we needed to do. We just would get in there and just when the cameras would roll, we would both just light up and just open our hearts and it would be weird and funny. We’d have moments where we couldn’t keep it together.

If 10 years down the line, you guys are just like, “let’s throw anything at the wall,” I want to see a series where you two go to Disneyland in character, visit SeaWorld, the whole nine...

Feeding each other cotton candy and stuff [laughs]. For sure.

I have to ask you about the nonlinear aspect of this story, the jumping back and forth. Talk a little about the process of approaching that and making sure you were in the right space for specific points in the show.

That’s a really interesting question because it was probably the biggest concern all throughout. As we developed it, there were actually three parts, there was a trial too, and we cut out the trial. We exonerated him [Clark] way before, but we jumped back and forth between those two stories. I’m luckily only in the backstory and never appear [in the present]. Jason was really specific and really wanted to talk about this stuff all the time. In the development process, I was very involved in when we should know certain things about Floyd, when we shouldn’t know certain things. And then on set, I kind of let it go and I let Steve be my guide for a lot of it. Mainly, the focus was on the tone and on how to maintain this tone and these characters and how to make them three-dimensional and believable, because you’re asking so much of the actors. The crazy conversations about all kinds of stuff, crazy dialogue, and it was, but then when we would hit it right, it would feel so original. So, for me, the timeline stuff, I sort of let Steve guide me. But, in general, I had known it for so long [as they developed] that I think I felt pretty good about where we were.

Alright David, last question, the first time we talked for this show, you admitted to never having seen the Scooby Doo movies with Linda. Have we gone back and watched them yet?

I haven’t watched the complete James Gunn filmography. I apologize, James Gunn. I have watched some of her scenes, though.

And they’re good, right?

I mean, the best. She’s the best! I really should go back and watch.