(NOTE LANGUAGE) While his career is going strong now, with the Stranger Things phenomenon, actor David Harbour wasn’t so sure after his 2019 reboot of Hellboy flopped.
Back then, he tells GQ, he reached out to another star whose career had suffered its own superheroic bomb: Ryan Reynolds.
Harbour explained, “I called him and I was like, ‘Hey man, I just need to know something. You know Green Lantern? Huge flop for you. What the f*** is that like, because I think I’m going to hit that right now.”
“Am I gonna be okay? Am I gonna survive this?” he recalls asking.
For his part, he said Reynolds was “sweet” about the situation.
Both actors have since rebounded: Harbour with his turn in the MCU with Black Widow and of course, Reynolds has been on a hot streak since 2016’s Deadpool, which the Free Guy and Adam Project star described as a make-or-break moment for his career.
In fact, he’s used Deadpool to make fun of himself for choosing Green Lantern, repeatedly — even going so far as to have the red-suited hero go back in time to shoot “Ryan Reynolds” before he could make the movie, as seen in Deadpool 2.
For Harbour, however, the fate of the project reinventing comic artist Mike Mignola‘s demonic creation is still bitter. “It was a very difficult experience because I wanted a lot out of it. I really like Mike Mignola. I like that character,” he says.
The character was previously portrayed by fan favorite Ron Perlman, in projects brought to the screen by Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro.
“[E]ven when [the reboot] was announced, I realized that people did not want that character reinvented,” Harbour expressed, calling himself “naive and optimistic” at the time.
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