How ‘Stranger Things’ Made David Harbour the Most Bankable Name on a ‘Suicide Squad’ Call Sheet He Barely Appeared In
Long before David Harbour was trading quips in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or wielding a sword as Santa Claus, he was quietly building a resume full of blink-and-you-missed-him movie roles. He had turned up in a vital sequence in ‘Brokeback Mountain’, got his Bond on in ‘Quantum of Solace’, and drawn recognition for stealing scenes from Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Revolutionary Road’, all without ever quite breaking through to household-name status. He was, by his own description, a working character actor navigating the long middle stretch of a career that had not yet found its rocket fuel.
That fuel arrived in the summer of 2016 in the form of a Netflix series about a small town in Indiana with a very big problem underneath it. ‘Stranger Things’ premiered on Netflix on July 15, 2016, and its perfect blend of genres, nostalgic eighties vibe, and stellar cast captured hearts almost immediately. Harbour’s portrayal of gruff, complicated police chief Jim Hopper became one of the show’s defining elements, and the cultural response was swift and overwhelming. The shockwave ‘Stranger Things’ sent through popular entertainment gave everyone connected to it an immediate boost in visibility.
The timing of that premiere turned out to have some genuinely wild real-world consequences, and Harbour recently shed light on one of the stranger ones. In a new interview with Variety, Harbour revealed that he received top billing on ‘Suicide Squad’ over Will Smith and Jared Leto despite appearing in the film with only three lines of dialogue. His explanation was as blunt as it was revealing. “The reason why was because ‘Stranger Things’ had come out,” he told Variety, “and I was number two on the StarMeter.”
The StarMeter measures a performer’s popularity on IMDb based on page views, reflecting real-time audience interest rather than a calculated assessment of star power or box office history. The fact that Harbour had climbed to that position while Will Smith and Jared Leto were among his co-stars is a remarkable snapshot of just how deeply ‘Stranger Things’ had burrowed into the public imagination within weeks of its debut. The film itself was headlined by Will Smith as Deadshot and Jared Leto as the Joker, two of the most attention-grabbing casting decisions in recent comic book movie history.
Harbour played Dexter Tolliver in ‘Suicide Squad’, a National Security Advisor who helped Amanda Waller make the case to the Pentagon for implementing Task Force X. His part amounted to little more than a few lines of dialogue and a few minutes of screen time. It is the kind of supporting role that rarely leaves a mark on the cultural conversation, yet his billing suggested he was the draw audiences most wanted to see.
For Harbour, the late-career surge gave him what he described as a well-leveled perspective on external success being almost independent of his particular love of acting. The ‘Suicide Squad’ billing story illustrates exactly that idea. The metrics of stardom caught up to him almost faster than the industry could process them, reshuffling the credits on a film he had barely appeared in because a streaming algorithm said so. Across all five seasons, ‘Stranger Things’ amassed more than one billion streams on Netflix, cementing the kind of legacy that makes a three-line role feel, in retrospect, like the accidental launchpad for one of the more unlikely Hollywood ascents of the past decade.
It is a story that says as much about how stardom is measured in the streaming era as it does about Harbour himself, and it raises a genuinely interesting question worth debating: do you think audience-driven metrics like the StarMeter should carry that kind of weight in shaping how Hollywood credits and promotes its talent?
