David Harbour Didn’t Think That Anyone Would Watch Stranger Things

Stranger Things might have become a television phenomenon, but David Harbour, the actor who plays Hawkins Police Chief Jim Hopper, says that he really didn't believe that anyone would watch the science fiction-horror Netflix series.

Speaking in an interview with Marc Maron on WTF with Marc Maron, Harbour opened up about his pessimistic outlook about how Stranger Things would perform when it released on Netflix. Though Harbour says he loved the script for the pilot episode of the show and thought that it was amazing, he really didn't think that he'd get cast.

"I love that pilot script," Harbour told the publication. "I thought it was amazing, and I actually didn't think that I would get cast, and then I wound up getting cast. It's a big Netflix show, you know? I didn't think they wanted to take a chance on me... I don't think they knew [that it would be that big], but still. I didn't know Netflix was doing that many series. Now they're doing everything, but at the time it felt kinda like a big deal."

The Stranger Things star also didn't think that the series would become a hit as shooting went along. Sure the cast and crew were working hard on the show, but Harbour just wasn't certain how viewers would take the ode-to-the-eighties series.

"But when we were shooting it, about four episodes in, I thought ‘Yeah, no one's going to watch this.'" Harbour went on. "I thought, you know, ‘I'm not good, and it's not good.' And it didn't help that, we were all working hard, but we were in a bubble. I just thought it was like, you know, in a long line of failures. Not tremendously. I mean, I'm being a little bit hyperbolic. But still."

Harbour was pretty wrong though. Netflix subscribers loved the mix of 80's elements in the science fiction-horror web series, and now Stranger Things has become one of the streaming platform's strongest shows.

Stranger Things season 3 hits Netflix sometime 2019.

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