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If the last time you saw Paul Reiser on the small screen he was wryly emoting about the state of his marriage to Helen Hunt, prepare to see a whole new side — more gravitas, less neurosis — as he contends with otherworldly monsters in Season 2 of the Netflix drama Stranger Things, premiering this Friday.
And if you haven't yet watched the hugely popular '80s-themed thriller, know that neither had Reiser until about a year ago, when his younger son copped to watching the entire first season in a single day. “I said, ‘Wait, when did you watch that?’ and he said ‘Yesterday.’ And I said, ‘What, for eight hours? No wonder you didn’t finish your homework!’”
Shortly thereafter, when Reiser received a call from his agent asking if he’d heard about the show, he didn’t miss a beat. “I said, ‘Ab-solutely, I know all about it. I’m on top of things, I keep my finger on the pulse,'” he recalls with the smooth, droll delivery that swiftly earned him stand-up fame.
At lunch with the show’s creators the next day — “creative geniuses and just really sweet guys” — Reiser says he was “tickled” to learn that the Duffer brothers, as they’re known, had created a new role around him. “They said, ‘We kept calling the character Paul Reiser, so we figured we should call — Paul Reiser.” Reiser’s (Reiser-like) reply? “Yes, it will lead to less confusion on set.”