I've always been passionate about the stories I want to tell.

I grew up doing regional Shakespeare, and when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father, there's something about that that you don't really do in film anymore.

You gotta do things your own way. You have to find your own path. You have to take what appeals to you and leave all the rest.

I can like Jack Nicolson's Joker, and I can like Heath Ledger's Joker. There's other Jokers I don't have to like.

All the work I do is personal, so the good stuff and the bad stuff that you see in there is all good stuff and bad stuff that I have, and part of the journey, for me, has been to embrace these things that I find embarrassing about myself: my stubbornness, my ego, my maudlin-ness - these things that I see myself do, and I go, 'Oh, David, stop that!'

I really like big swashbuckling superhero films, but I feel like that Marvel universe is not adult enough.

One of the most beautiful things about Shakespeare's Hamlet is when he stops in the middle of the play to ask, 'To be or not to be?' Then, right at the end, he decides to 'let be.' The first season of 'Stranger Things' was Hopper asking whether 'to be or not to be' and the second is to 'let be.'

I feel, in storytelling, people are so afraid that you won't get it unless you pound them over the head.

I am a dude who is meant to be on a couch in New York City thumbing through magazines.

Myself, I suffer from loneliness. And I think we all feel alone. I'm looking for stories that help people deal with loneliness and help them if they are monsters: they don't have to undertake monstrous actions. And maybe they're not monsters.

I feel like Shakespeare is so epic, in a way that sci-fi genre stuff is epic, it transcends the mundane, and it takes you to this place of real passion and real beauty.

I'm around 6'4' and 240 pounds. So I rarely feel that intimidated by other men. But I've got to give it up to Terry Bradshaw. That guy is a complete bulldog.

At the end of the day, what I try to bring to villainous characters is a sense of humanity.

The fact is, for years, I had been trapped in a certain narcissism and a desire to have a certain body and look sexy.

All of Aaron Sorkin's characters are so smart.

Always, with speeches, I feel like it's an opportunity to say something.

At the end of the day, my biggest fear in life is that I'm gonna wind up being an actor who plays the dad on a TV show like 'Full House' or 'Small Wonder' or something - I'm, like, the desexualized dad in the show 'Alf.'

I was sober for, like, a year and a half, and I was 25, and I actually did have a manic episode, and I was diagnosed as bipolar.

A lot of the characters I gravitate towards feel like outsiders.

The mythos of superheroes is our mythos today. They are American myths. 'Captain America,' 'Iron Man,' 'Hulk' - these are the biggest movies in the world. But sometimes, superhero movies can be a little bit thin.

Untangling Christmas lights is the true tragedy of 'Stranger Things.'

When I was in 8th grade, I saw Branagh's 'Henry V' in the Paris Theater, and it changed my life.

The fact that I got famous and became a sex symbol around my normal, frumpy, love-handled self is so gratifying - and, dare I say, culturally gratifying as well.

I love taking people on that journey, which I feel like can open them up to seeing human beings a little more complexly. People that you originally don't like, maybe they have reasons for the way they are, and maybe we can start to understand each other a little better as opposed to being quick to judge and dismiss people.