David Harbour Got Top Billing in ‘Suicide Squad’ Over Will Smith and Jared Leto With Only Three Lines – Here’s Why

Hollywood is full of unexpected stories about how careers intersect with timing, and David Harbour has just shared one of the more eyebrow-raising examples to emerge in recent memory.

The actor, best known to millions as the gruff but warm-hearted Chief Jim Hopper in ‘Stranger Things’, has been on quite a press run lately, opening up about some of the biggest moments in a career that spans decades of stage, film, and television work. But it is a revelation about his tiny role in a massive superhero blockbuster that is getting people talking.

Harbour sat down with Variety for a wide-ranging cover story in which he addresses his mental health, the conclusion of ‘Stranger Things’, and the fallout from his ex-wife Lily Allen’s album ‘West End Girl’. In the interview, the conversation also turned to his time in the DC universe, and what he revealed about the billing situation on that film is genuinely hard to believe.

It turns out that Harbour received top billing in ‘Suicide Squad’ above Jared Leto and Will Smith, despite having just three lines in the entire film. His explanation for how that happened is as candid as it is fascinating. “The reason why was because ‘Stranger Things’ had come out,” he told Variety, “and I was number two on the StarMeter.” In other words, the Netflix phenomenon had made him so visible in the cultural conversation that his industry ranking outpaced that of one of the biggest movie stars on the planet and an acclaimed Oscar-winning actor known for playing the Joker.

The irony is hard to overstate. Harbour played Dexter Tolliver in ‘Suicide Squad’, a National Security Advisor of the US government who had very little screen time. Harbour’s part in the film amounted to little more than a few lines of dialogue, though his character did help the movie by being supportive of Amanda Waller’s idea to implement the Suicide Squad. Meanwhile, 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.

The David Ayer-directed film had a budget of $175 million and grossed over $749 million at the worldwide box office, making it one of the commercially successful superhero films of its era despite a divisive critical reception. The notion that Harbour, appearing in just a handful of scenes, received higher billing than the film’s marquee names is a perfect encapsulation of how the streaming era reshuffled Hollywood’s traditional power structures almost overnight.

The timing of ‘Stranger Things’ landing in the summer of the same year as ‘Suicide Squad’s release had enormous consequences for Harbour’s trajectory. ‘Stranger Things’ premiered on Netflix on July 15, 2016, to wide critical and audience acclaim, turning Harbour’s portrayal of Jim Hopper into an almost instant fan favourite. The show was written and directed by the Duffer Brothers, and the cultural shockwave it sent through popular entertainment gave everyone connected to it an immediate boost in visibility.

The StarMeter, which measures a performer’s popularity on IMDb based on page views, reflects real-time audience interest rather than a calculated assessment of star power or box office history. That Harbour had climbed to number two on that metric while Will Smith and Jared Leto were his co-stars speaks volumes about how deeply ‘Stranger Things’ had burrowed into the public imagination within weeks of its debut. It was, in every sense, the kind of timing that money cannot manufacture.

Looking back at the ‘Suicide Squad’ billing story now, it reads as a kind of accidental monument to what ‘Stranger Things’ did for everyone involved in it. A man with three lines and a small supporting role in a film packed with Hollywood royalty ended up with his name above theirs, purely because an eight-episode Netflix genre show had made him number two on the internet’s most-watched popularity tracker. That is a sentence that could only be written in the streaming era.

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