Out of all the questions the cast from Stranger Things must have to answer over and over on their whirlwind tour of massive success, the Barb subject must be the most repetitive. Fans of the show loved Barb, who had the loyalty of a lion but the fashion sense of a blind librarian. The town’s casual reaction to her disappearance in comparison to the furor made about Will had a lot of viewers demanding #JusticeForBarb, and according to one of the stars, we may just get that.
David Harbour, who plays the reluctant, burnt-out Chief Jim Hopper on the show, was visibly annoyed when Jimmy Fallon brought up Barb in a recent interview.
“The internet rage over Barb’s — like, who knew?” he exclaimed. “Shannon [Purser, who plays Barb] is amazing, but the character’s in two episodes barely, and the internet rage at Chief Hopper over not caring about Barb — I’m sorry! I had a little boy I had to save. Ugh. There will be justice for Barb but I can assure you, if you think Barb’s coming back, she’s fully dead. There was a slug and the whole…”
I guess it’s one thing these days to be a part of a show that elicits this kind of emotion and another to play a character on said show who fans point to as part of the problem. Somewhere along the line, Harbour probably started getting legitimately angry fan communication from the internet blaming him for his character not saving (or not caring to save) Barb. Never mind the fact that the Hawkins Laboratory people moved her car to the bus station and made it look like she ran away. Let’s get angry at one of the actors on the show!
Even if most of the individual tweets and comments thrown at Harbour were half-joking, imagine getting a couple hundred of them a day cursing you for something your character did or didn’t do in a fictional show. What a strange time we live in, that actors end up having to deal with the faux outrage of these viral trends. It’s no wonder David Harbour wants #JusticeForBarb in season two of Stranger Things just as badly as the rest of us, just so he can go back to reading his mentions without all the daily fan rage.
