There's A New Doctor In Town On 'Stranger Things'

After waiting patiently for well over a year (or maybe not-so-patiently), it's finally time to dive back into the wonderful — and, dare I say, strange — world of Stranger Things Season 2. But while I'm eager to welcome back some very beloved characters (looking at you, Eleven!), I'm also excited to see the show bring a new crop of characters into the fold, particularly when it comes to the new doctor in town. So who plays Dr. Owens on Stranger Things? Paul Reiser was literally made for the role. Or rather, the role was made for him.

When things wrapped up on the first season of Stranger Things, Will Byers might have been saved, but things were looking pretty grim for poor Eleven who, in the best case scenario, was still alive but stuck back in the Upside Down. That's to the Season 2 trailer, we know that she's able to escape and come back to the real world, though she'll still undoubtedly want to be hiding out from the people working at Hawkins Lab, given the cruel way she was treated there before.

However, it now looks like the second season of Stranger Things is going to be taking a deeper look into what exactly goes on in that very creepy lab. This involves getting to know some new characters, including one that the show's creators initially just called "Paul Reiser" before they decided to name him Dr. Owens. Apparently Reiser really couldn't be any more perfect for this part if he tried, because it was literally created around him.

You may recognize Reiser as the traitorous Burke from the classic 1980s science fiction flick, Aliens. Well, his performance in that certainly had an impact on Stranger Things co-creators Ross and Matt Duffer since they used his former role as inspiration when creating Reiser's Stranger Things character. "We want people to have those debates like, ‘Do you trust that guy or is he Burke?'” Ross said Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. "Paul was saying the reason James Cameron cast him is because he thought people would inherently trust him and it would be a twist." So does this mean Dr. Owens will be another Dr. Brenner incarnate? Fans will just have to wait and see. But backstabbing scientists are hardly the only roles that Reiser is famous for.

In the '90s, the golden age of the sitcom, Reiser created and starred in his own beloved show called Mad About You alongside Helen Hunt. The show was about a newly married couple in New York City and the various domestic problems the two of them dealt with together. The show ran from 1992 to 1999. At this point, Reiser knows a thing or two about marriage, as he has been married to his wife Paula Revets for almost 30 years.

Recently, Reiser has been working on a number of other projects in addition to being part of Stranger Things. He has acted in several movies and stars in another show set in the 1980s. He plays the part of the acerbic Getty in the Amazon Original series Red Oaks, about a college student's last hurrah, while working over the summer at country club. But even with all the other things that Reiser is working on, he's excited to be a part of the Stranger Things world and all the hype that goes along with it.

In an interview with Paste, Reiser talked a little bit about Stranger Things 2 and what working on it was like. "That's part of what's exciting about the show, is that it's challenging," Reiser said with admiration for the show's writing. "It challenges your intelligence and it doesn't pander." He joked that his character was going to come back in the third season as a tap dancer. I don't know how Stranger Things Season 2 really ends but who knows, maybe he's not even joking about the tap dancing thing.

In any case, I am officially excited to watch Reiser in Stranger Things, and figure out for myself whether he's actually a good guy, or maybe he's not to be trusted.

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