War of the Worlds, a science fiction movie about aliens taking over planet Earth, is widely considered to be one of the best Steven Spielberg movies of all time. Although David Harbour is well versed in fighting otherworldly monsters as Hopper in sci-fi series Stranger Things, he revealed in an interview with Yahoo! that back when the 2000s movie was made, he actually had a small part in it.
We’ll save you the trouble of wracking through the movie looking for him, though. As he revealed in Yahoo’s Role Recall interview, he ended up being cut from the thriller movie — although he did eventually work with Spielberg years later.
“I was credited as ‘Dock Worker’… I was in a scene with me and Tom Cruise at a bar,” he recalled. “I don’t know if you remember the movie, but [Cruise’s character] works nights and he gets off work at the dock and he goes and he’s late to pick up his kid. And that’s where the mom gets really mad at him for being a deadbeat dad sort of situation. Well, in the original screenplay, there was a scene where the reason why he’s late is he’s out drinking with his buddy at the bar after his shift at like eight in the morning.”
“And his buddy at the bar was me. And we had a little scene in this bar and it was not a great scene. It was also not a necessary scene to the film at all,” Herbour says. “And we shot it and I remember thinking it was probably gonna get cut, but Spielberg was there and it was so exciting to meet him. He cast me. And then, you know, it just got cut, just never wound up in the movie.”
He added, “It’s crushing. It’s crushing and horrible. But it was kind of great ‘cause years later Spielberg produced Revolutionary Road and he came up to me at another table reading for something else and he was just ‘Oh, David, I just wanna say ‘I really love you in Revolutionary Road. I think you’re just terrific. We’re so happy. I really one day would love to work with you.’ And I did not bring up the fact that we had already worked together and he had cut me out of his movie.”