Outer Banks star Chase Stokes didn’t come by the role of John B. Routledge easily, particularly because it was with some of the same people who had been there when he “absolutely effed up” his audition for Netflix hit Stranger Things.

“I walked in, did the audition [for Outer Banks] the first day, and they’re like, ‘great, cool,'” Stokes explained on the latest episode of Podcrushed.

The then-unknown actor was told to come back the next day and they would look over the material, before bringing in the executives a day later. But that’s not what happened.

“I show up the next day,” Stokes recalled, “and Jonas Pate, who’s the creator, and directs the majority of our show, comes in and goes, ‘Hey, surprise!’ I’m like, ‘What?’ It’s like, ‘Surprise, they’re all here in the conference room. I didn’t want you to over-prepare, because I think if you were to do that, you would be too in your head.'”

Chase Stokes talks about his ‘Outer Banks’ audition.Jeff Hahne/Getty

Stokes was floored.

“So I’m standing there, like, All right. OK…. I feel good enough to do this. Mm-hmm. And I walk in and I saw the executives that were in the room for Stranger Things,” he said. “I was like, Oh, I’m so f—ed. Like, I’m so screwed. There’s nothing about this that’s gonna go over well.“

He told himself that he’d already done the worst he could do, but that didn’t help. So he asked to take a moment.

“And I walked out of the room, and I knew that I was at the end, the tail end of the mom conversations of saying, you know, ‘One more month,'” Stokes said. “And I sat on the curb, and I just started sobbing. Because I thought I failed. I thought, like, This is it. This is where this whole idea of being an actor, being an artist, or working in this industry — this is it. It had all come down to this moment, and I had nothing left, and I’m sitting on a curb in Charleston, S.C., just done.”

That’s when Pate gave him a hand.

“Jonas came out, and by the grace of whatever higher power you wanna believe in, he just looked at me,” Stokes recalled. “And he saw me and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on right now, but whatever version of you that this is, I wanna work with that kid. So if you can bring any bit of what you’re doing right now into that room,’ he goes, ‘I’m gonna fight for you.'”

His Stranger Things experience did not end, of course, with him being cast as Steve Harrington, who is played by Joe Keery.

“I forgot all the lines and absolutely effed up,” he told Access Hollywood in February 2023. “I drove eight hours from Atlanta back to Orlando regretting every moment of my life on that.”