“Wow, that’s flattering”: the role David Harbour was told he was too fat to play
Much as we are supposed to live in far more progressive, less discriminatory times, that often doesn’t quite filter through to Hollywood, where physical perfection still dictates the kind of people we do or don’t see on the big screen.
Weight certainly plays into that; in fact, the only time we’ve seen someone actually obese in recent years, it was when Brendon Fraser was in The Whale, and that was seen as so brave he got an Oscar for it. It’s something Stranger Things’ star David Harbour knows a thing or two about as well.
Not that Harbour was ever quite at the level that Fraser was portraying, but he’s certainly seen fit in these days of Ozempic jabs to lose a bit of timber, and when you hear what he’s come up against while trying to pick up jobs, then that ‘glow up’ begins to make a bit of sense. Along with the likes of Chris Pratt, Fraser has definitely moved into the ‘muscle-bound action hero’ mould in the last five years, a transformation that was actually remarked upon in the final season of The Duffer Brothers’ hit Netflix show.
But some years back, it would seem Fraser wasn’t quite at the same levels of peak physical performance (by movieland standards anyway), and it cost him a first go at a superhero film. He told The Wrap: “I auditioned for one of the Wolverine movies, and I bumped into one of the casting directors on the lot, and she was really sweet, and she was like: ‘Oh my god, David Harbour, you’re in town! I have the perfect role for you.’ I was like, ‘Great, I need to work, what do you got?’ She’s like ‘THE BLOB!’”
Now it’s fair to say that, going by the name alone, that’s a character which conjures up some images, and it’s probably not a part that any actor is going to play without a degree of concern that someone was casting aspersions on their physical prowess. Especially when you hear that the technical description of ‘The Blob’ is ‘a mutant originally described as a morbidly obese circus freak’.
Harbour added: “‘She was like, ‘Yeah, it’s like an X-Men, he’s like big, fat and controls gravity,’ and I was like ‘OK, wow, that’s flattering.’ And she was like, ‘No, no, it’s not that you’re fat, it’s just that we need a big guy to wear the suit.’”
Initial fears allayed, Harbour decided to go ahead and audition for the role, even jokingly lifting up his shirt to show his stomach and declare that he had the ‘blob’ the moviemakers were looking for, a decision that ended up backfiring quite spectacularly, because it lost him the job entirely, and if we are to assume that the movie in question was 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine it went to Canadian actor Kevin Durand instead.
When you see the size of The Blob in the final film, you can understand why Harbour might still be a bit upset about the whole scenario, because the character is pretty enormous, and to be rejected for being ‘too fat’ (when Harbour was nowhere near as weighty as the finished article) is bound to sting.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, dude, pause for one second,’” he concluded. “‘You are telling me I’m too fat to play The Blob? That’s awesome, I have to get the fuck back to New York.’ That’s my audition – so I didn’t get The Blob.”
