David Harbour Shed 80 Pounds for a Role—Something He’ll Never Do Again

David Harbour is ditching the Pilates classes.

The Stranger Things star took on a rigorous workout routine to lose weight after Hopper was imprisoned in a Soviet camp in season four. He enrolled in Pilates and began intermittent fasting, dropping as much as 80 pounds over the course of eight months—but as he recently told GQ, “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.”

“Yeah, never again,” he said, before adding that special effects can do the work. “The prosthetics are too good.”

David is equally repelled by the idea of method acting, the process of immersing yourself in a character. He looked back on playing a Scottish King and thinking to himself “‘I’m gonna kill a cat’ or something: ‘I’m gonna go murder something to know what it feels like to murder,” adding, “I didn’t actually do it, obviously.”

He continued, “Not only is that stuff silly, it’s dangerous, and it actually doesn’t produce good work.”