David Harbour has shared that he turned to Ryan Reynolds after finding a flop on his hands in 2019’s Hellboy, also touching on a casting idea for Stranger Things‘ spin-off series in a recent interview with GQ.
Harbour noted in the piece published Monday that he approached Reynolds for advice given his own famous experience with failure, via the 2011 Warner Bros. pic Green Lantern.
“I know [Ryan] a little bit. I called him and I was like, Hey man, I just need to know something. You know ‘Green Lantern?’ Huge flop for you,” the actor recalled. “What the f**k is that like, because I think I’m going to hit that right now. Am I gonna be okay? Am I gonna survive this?”
Neil Marshall’s superhero film starring Harbour rebooted Guillermo del Toro’s franchise, which was itself based on the Dark Horse comics, grossing just over $55M worldwide against a budget of 50M. Green Lantern, meanwhile, grossed just under $220M at a $200M budget.
While Harbour didn’t get specific as to the advice he received from Reynolds, he shared that the actor was “sweet” to him, before touching on the Stranger Things spin-off series previously announced by the show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers. While the spin-off’s plot hasn’t yet been revealed, and it’s unclear how his character Sheriff Hopper will fare at the end of the original show’s fifth and final season, the actor says that at this point, he feels that Hopper is “a character that can exist independent” of him.
“If they wanna go back in time, forward in time… I’d love to see another actor play Hopper, and see what they can bring to it,” he said. In a later email, Harbour specifically cited Euphoria‘s Jacob Elordi as his pick to play a younger version of the character—deadpanning, “He could pull off being as handsome as I was at 20.”
Stranger Things came to the end of its fourth season on July 1st, when its second volume of two episodes for 2022 dropped on the streamer. Harbour is currently starring opposite Bill Pullman in the play Mad House on the West End, and will next appear in Universal’s holiday thriller, Violent Night.