David Harbour, best-known for playing dutiful cop Jim Hopper in Stranger Things, might never get this role.
If the series creators, the Duffer brothers, had gotten their first casting choice.
The showrunners share this shocker on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused.
Surprisingly, Harbour himself fielded this question to the creators on the show.
He demanded the truth from them.
“Hello, Duffer Brothers,” he said in a pre-recorded question, which Horowitz shared.
“I would like to know the casting process of Hopper.”
“I’m pretty sure I was second choice, and I don’t know who I was second choice to — maybe I was third choice?
“But would you please answer the question of how I came to be cast as Chief Hopper and who had to say no to allow me to do that wonderful, incredible role?”
Horowitz, the host, guessed it was Josh Brolin.
Instantly, Matt Duffer, in a jestic manner, clarified, “No, no, no, no, no, no.”
Then he dropped the name of the first casting choice for Jim Hopper, “No, it was Billy Crudup.”
Now, looking back at their original choice, Duffer acknowledges, “It is a very different– like, everything happens for a reason, right?”
He continues, “So it’s like, once it kind of clicks into place.”
Duffer reveals Crudup declined the role in Stranger Things: “But yeah, Billy Crudup passed.”
“I don’t think he was doing much TV at the time,” he notes.
Automatically, Harbour landed the role and became one of the best-known faces on global television.
