Stranger Things has garnered a laundry list of accolades for its thrilling storytelling and terrific acting, including six Primetime Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe nominations (and counting). However, one of the show’s biggest stars—soon-to-be Hellboy David Harbour—recently admitted that he did not have much faith that the show would succeed.
“When we were shooting it, about four episodes in, I thought ‘Yeah, no one’s going to watch this,'” Harbour, who plays the series’ beloved Sheriff Hopper, said on an episode of the WTF With Marc Maron earlier this year. “I thought … ‘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,” Harbour continued. “I just thought it was like, you know, in a long line of failures … I had grown very cynical. But so this was one of those opportunities where my expectations were really low … And so before it came out, I was scared.”
Harbour has been involved in plenty of hit-or-miss projects, and he thought Stranger Things was going to be a major miss even during the weeks leading up to the series’ release.
“I was actually doing a play with a guy who was on a very successful TV show,” Harbour explained. “And like three weeks before [Stranger Things] came out, there were no ads in New York. No ads on buses, nothing. And then a week before it came out, no ads anywhere. I talked to [the actor] and was like ‘There’s no ads. Is that a bad sign?’ And he was like ‘They’re burying it. They’re trying to bury it.’ And I was like ‘Oh my god. My one f***ing shot, and they’re burying my show.’ And then it came out, and it was like a zeitgeist.”
“They claim now that they did it on purpose, where people claim ownership over it because they discover it and then they tell their friends,” said Harbour, who won a Critics Choice Award for his role as Hopper. “And it is kind of brilliant, when you think about it, if that is the case.”
The ultimate sign of the show’s popularity is the nonstop hype for the third season, which is expected to arrive in summer 2019.
