3 min read
SOMETIMES, WHEN A movie or television show has been part of our lives for so long, it can be impossible to imagine certain things any other way. While there were certainly plenty of ups and downs during the course of Stranger Things’s five-season run on Netflix (which came to an end on New Year’s 2025), one that no one has ever doubted was the casting of David Harbour as Jim Hopper. Hopper, who was initially the police chief of the show’s fictional Hawkins, Indiana setting, became one of the breakout heroes of the show, earning Harbour two Emmy nominations and sending his career on an ascendant path.
As it turns out, however, Harbour wasn’t the original pick to play the character. On a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, host Joshua Horowitz got Harbour to send in a video question for guests Ross and Matt Duffer, who created Stranger Things. In the video, Harbour seems to know he wasn’t their first choice. “I’m pretty sure I was second choice, and I don’t know who I was second choice to,” he says, before asking the brothers for clarity around the process.
Matt Duffer offers up a clue, initially, saying that their original pick was one of Harbour’s “good friends,” and that Harbour may not have even known that. Horowitz then suggested a name that he and Harbour had come up with together—Josh Brolin.
That wasn’t accurate. The real pick, it turned out, was Almost Famous legend Billy Crudup.
“No, no, no,” Matt said. “It was Billy Crudup! Which is a very different… everything happens for a reason, right?”
Matt said that at the time, Crudup wasn’t doing much TV (which sounds like the explanation the brothers got when he passed on the project at the time). He did, however, appear in Netflix’s Gypsy in 2017 (a year after Stranger Things debuted, alongside his now-wife Naomi Watts), and began a role on Apple TV’s The Morning Show in 2019, a part that has since earned him four Emmy nominations and two wins. He also appeared in Apple TV’s Hello Tomorrow in 2023.
“It all worked out for everybody,” Matt continued. “David, honestly, just came in and one of our casting directors thought he could be great for the role…We just saw the tape and it was so clear instantly:This is Hopper. And we just cast him right then and there.”
Harbour has already seen his own post-Stranger Things success on television, starring in the acclaimed HBO series DTF St. Louis earlier this year.
As Matt says, their original vision of Hopper and Stranger Things would have been vastly different. Crudup and Harbour are both fantastic actors, but their energies come from a different place. Harbour played Hopper with a gruffness that often was chipped away to reveal a warm heart. Crudup, meanwhile, typically plays things a little cooler, with his expressive face allowing his emotions to burst through the seams as they materialize. It’s easy to see how his Hopper could have played out, but it would have likely made for a very different character, and, ultimately, a very different show.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
