“I think there’s some unfinished business,” the Hellboy actor said in the same interview. Harbour, for his part, thinks that Joyce and Hopper dated in high school but never got full closure on their romance. “I have this whole thing with Joyce that maybe she went to Chicago after graduating and got into the hippie thing,” the Beetlejuice actress told the Los Angeles Times in May 2018. The pair are also close outside of work, going so far as to invent backstories for Joyce and Hopper before the events of the Netflix series. These are two lost, broken people who need each other but are so prideful and messed up that they’ll never admit it.” “I consider it a little bit like Chinatown, with Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson. “Ever since I read the pilot, I loved the relationship with Hopper and Joyce,” Harbour told Variety in November 2017. The duo’s onscreen chemistry has added an element of romance to the sci-fi show over the years, even as they have to fight off Demogorgons, evil scientists and Mind Flayers. Stranger Things characters Joyce Byers ( Winona Ryder) and Jim Hopper ( David Harbour) aren’t actually dating, but fans have long pleaded with writers to put them together.
