Jennifer Coolidge Got Mad at David Harbour for Not Strangling Her Hard Enough

It’s likely a Hollywood first that an A-list actor got in trouble for not hurting a woman.

Stranger Things’ David Harbour appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to promote his upcoming comedy/horror film We Have a Ghost in which Harbour plays a mute phantom whom an aspiring YouTube celebrity seeks to exploit for internet fame. The film co-stars Jennifer Coolidge of The White Lotus and American Pie fame, whom Harbour affectionately called “America’s Sweetheart” as he recounted the time Coolidge berated him for refusing to choke her in a scene they shared.

Knowing Coolidge’s body count, it’s probably not the first time she’s had to yell at a younger man to go harder.

“She is as amazing as you think she would be,” Harbour said of his un-strangled scene partner. Harbour told the story of how Coolidge was asked to run screaming out a window à la an early career Helen Hunt and demanded to do the scene over and over with different affectations in order to get the best shot. “We did about fifteen takes,” Harbour said as Coolidge created even more ridiculous performances of a woman plummeting to the pavement. He remarked, “I’d never seen ever animal, every sound … it was a lesson.”

Harbour recalled his hesitancy to get physical with Coolidge during a more violent scene between the two of them, saying, “There’s this CGI thing that shoots out of my face and there’s this hand and it strangles her, so I did it with my hand,” but the six-foot-three-inch actor was unsatisfyingly gentle with his 61-year-old co-star for her taste. “She was really pissed. We stopped the take and she was like, ‘David, you gotta really strangle me! You gotta strangle me!’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to murder America’s Sweetheart!’”

Not with that weak-ass grip, you're not.