David Harbour is best known for playing Chief Jim Hopper in the Netflix series Stranger Things, but he's also left a decent mark on the comic book movie genre in less than a decade. He played D.A. Frank Scanlon in 2011's The Green Hornet, he made a minor appearance in 2016's Suicide Squad as Dexter Tolliver and he's been cast as the new Hellboy for the upcoming reboot, Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen. As it turns out, Harbour almost had a fourth comic book credit on his resume, as he auditioned years ago to play Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and the reason he didn't score that role was shockingly because he was considered to be too fat.
During his audition process for Blob, a role for which he was suggested because the X-Men Origins: Wolverine team needed "a big guy to wear the suit," David Harbour read for the part normally, but at the very end, he jokingly pulled up his shirt, squeezed his belly fat and said, "I got your Blob right here!" Doing that killed his chance of getting to play the character, because as Harbour recalled to The Wrap:
I just made a stupid joke and then they called me and the director, we met at like a hotel, and he was like, 'David, look, you're wonderful, we really think you're just a great actor, we're just concerned... we're really concerned.' I was like, 'Why, what's your concern? I'm good to go. I'm available, let's do this!' And they were like, 'no, it's just, you lifted up your shirt and we saw the... we're just a little worried about your health.'
Upon hearing the astounding news that he was too fat to play Blob, a character whose primary physical trait in the X-Men universe is his heaviness, David Harbour told the director (Gavin Hood) that this claim was "awesome," but that he had to "get the fuck back to New York." Nearly 10 years later, Harbour considers these events to be his "Hollywood story," and we don't blame him for feeling that way; extra weight is the last reason you'd normally expect for someone to miss out on playing Blob.
Lost actor Kevin Durand was eventually cast as Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where he started out as a muscular and imposing, but became obese years later following the dissolution of William Stryker's Team X. Blob also cameoed in X-Men: Apocalypse (played by Giant Gustav Claude Ouimet) as the opponent Angel defeated in a cage fight before Nightcrawler was brought in.
Fortunately for David Harbour, he's done well for himself despite not joining the X-Men franchise, both with Blob and when he was passed over to play Cable in Deadpool 2. You can see Harbour back on the small screen when Stranger Things Season 2 drops on Halloween.
