Alyson Hannigan

He may play a spazzed-out womanizer on How I Met Your Mother, but in real life, Neil Patrick Harris makes a warm, funny, and in no way lecherous lunchtime companion. While neglecting to eat his chicken club sandwich, he chatted about his sitcom, life in the theater, and the decision to announce his homosexuality last fall - a difficult choice he handled with grace.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So you’re making this resurgence after a number of years doing Broadway theater - roles like Lee Harvey Oswald in Assassins and the emcee in Cabaret. Were you looking to do a sitcom like How I Met Your Mother?

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS: No, not at all. In fact, I had said that would be the thing I would not want to do. I’m a sort of stickler for authenticity. I found that the conventional sitcom conceit belies authenticity. You’ve got a room of writers that are all wanting their jokes to make it, and laughing really hard at their own jokes, and then when it comes to tape day it’s like a pressure cooker, and the audience is there, and they’re all caffeinated up and they’re told to laugh at everything, so you take the third pass at a scene and it’s all jokes that they’ve heard, but they laugh really loudly because they’ve been told by some guy with a microphone to do so.

So then what makes How I Met Your Mother, or as I’ve taken to calling it, HIMYiM -

HIMYiM! Nice!

- different?

We don’t have a live audience. So we film on Friday just for the crew and ourselves. It’s sort of a hybrid. I think we’re the Prius of sitcoms.

I think I’m coming to your set on Thursday.

Thursday’s gonna be a hoot. Strippers.

What is it with you and strippers?

I think [my character] Barney likes to put people in a situation with strippers and then sit back and laugh while things unfold.

But it’s not just Barney. Apparently there are some strippers in the new Harold and Kumar...

Mad strippers! They’re straight up prostitutes. Women of ill repute. On How I Met Your Mother, I think I refer to her as an ’’insertionist.’’ But I’m not sure that’ll make it into the next draft. Just based on your reaction.

So when can we start calling this a Friends for the next generation?

[Laughs] If only.

You feel pretty secure about the show’s existence, though?

Well, in so much as we haven’t heard anything bad. You never know if CBS will have a big shakeup in the summer and bring in all new people that only want romantic reality-based shows. I wish more people were watching, you know?

What do you think needs to happen for that to occur?

We need Howie Mandel to have another one of his famous meltdowns. For Howie Mandel to pull a Dave Chappelle. That would be awesome.

The group of people you’re working with - Alyson Hannigan from Buffy, Jason Segel from Freaks and Geeks - do you vets have a responsibility to help Josh Radnor and Cobie Smulders, the newbies, keep up?

I think we had thicker skins, because we have sort of war wounds, more than Josh and Cobie. They were fresh-faced. I just think in this business it’s easy to take things personally, so the whole idea of faces on billboards and interviews with magazines and soundbites on Entertainment Tonight is hard to process if you haven’t done it before.

Do you have a moment from your teenage years when you realized what you gotten yourself into?

I was in a movie called Clara’s Heart with Whoopi Goldberg as a little kid, and we flew in from New Mexico to go to a screening of it, and drove by the Warner Bros. lot where they have those big giant billboards, and there was a big giant billboard for Clara’s Heart and my face was there. That was a pretty awesome experience. It sort of makes you go all quiet when you see that. At least coming from tiny town New Mexico. It’s a pretty daunting thing.

But so then are you like, ’’Well, this is it! This is my life as a movie star! I’ve made it!’’

I guess one of the beauties of Doogie was there was never a sense of, ’’Ya made it, kid! You’re a stah!’’ We were working, like, all the time. And when I wasn’t working, I was back in Albuquerque going to school. So I got to avoid the Teen Beat years.

I may have had a couple magazines with you in them.

I did a couple of those. And it sucked my soul away.

Why?

It was like pancake makeup and a bright blue backdrop, and you holding a soccer ball. On a chair. And, like, smiling. Oh, it was just horrible.

But surely there are a number of people who would have really enjoyed that.

I was a late-bloomer kid with acne. I didn’t feel like a studly River Phoenix [type of] dude that was getting all the chicks. I was this little kid who was on a TV show. So to have posters of me... it seemed so odd.

So you weren’t acting as Doogie, is what you’re telling me.

Was he a dweeb?

He was kind of a dweeb.

He was kind of cool, though. He had a hot girlfriend from the beginning.

And Wanda’s one of those defining TV girlfriends. Her and Winnie Cooper.

It’s true. The Ws.

He was still kinda dorky though.

He did wear the piano tie. That’s a bad sign.

Do you feel like there was a point recently where, commercially, you decided to throw yourself out there again? Ramp up your career?

I think there was a financial desire to not work as hard and make a lot more money. When you work hard in the theater...

I respect you for admitting that.

Not like that’s the sole reason why I’d do it. Theater is incredibly demanding. Especially when you’re doing Broadway. So if you’re doing a seven-month gig, it’s kicking your ass and you love it, but you’re kind of going into debt when you do it. So at a certain point you have to think, Oy. There must be a better way. I had the financial freedom from doing Doogie for four years that I wasn’t scrounging. I just thought, Ooh, it’s tough. That life is tough. New York life is great, it expands you as a full-bodied individual. But it would be nice to be in one place and work for a while and have a dog.

You were really creepy in Assassins, by the way.

Penn and Teller, when I was a kid in New York, said, ’’You like theater? You gotta see this show at Playwrights Horizons called Assassins. It’s a musical! A Stephen Sondheim musical, and the killers are the protagonists, and they have this great hanging...’’ When Penn and Teller tell you to go see something, you go.

I love that. Why were you hanging out with them?

Cause they’re the coolest. I’m a magician. So. I know those magic folk. But I think, to go back to your last question about why I left the theater and went back to TV - I was more going from the TV to the theater. Doogie was fun, but it was such a defining chapter for me, where I was less known for my actual name as for my fictional name. And it was happening while I was sort of defining myself as a person. From 16 to 19, I was sort of going through puberty and being observed by other people a lot, and it was this little box I was acting in, so I felt like, I don’t know who I am in the world. So going to New York was a really helpful experience for me because it moved me from being in closeup all the time to being on the big stage where I had to physicalize myself and figure out how I stand and how I move. And I mean that literally, but also sort of metaphorically. And then when you come back to L.A., then you can sit with that confidence and make choices on a larger scale without feeling like you’re a phony.

So you found this talent for being a psychotic, womanizing...

That was all Harold and Kumar. That was not what I desired.

But they told you you’d be playing yourself as this guy, and you said...

Awesome. I would never think that anyone would want me to be that guy. Ever. Based on my path up to that point. So I think if that was the joke - and I was down with playing it - I didn’t want it to seem like I was disrespecting the past. I was making sure I didn’t seem like I was Neil Patrick Harris, quote-unquote, cool guy, hated that show, crapping on Doogie Howser.

So the solution was to take it as far as you could?

No, the solution was to make sure that it was sort of odd and reverential and respected, as opposed to being gratuitous. I just didn’t want to be the butt of the joke.

Right. Did they just come to you, or was Kirk Cameron waiting in the lobby?

[Laughs] Anthony Michael Hall was busy. No, they just thought it was cool. They just liked the show and thought it was cool. So it turned out to be a really nice chain of events.

Is Barney based on someone you’ve known?

Kind of. I have friends who do that. I admire his desire to have everything become a grand adventure. If he gets drinks thrown in his own face, it’s a great story to tell his friends. So that’s how he lives his life, and I think that’s hilarious.

And now we’ve seen a couple little revelations of his past, his tragic past. Do you find that more interesting than just coming up with new ways to high-five people?

I’m very worried that they’ll jump the shark. So the less they know about Barney I think the better.

So maybe we’ve already seen too much?

No, I love that they’ll announce that Wayne Brady is my gay black brother, but won’t discuss the parents, how that happened. That’s just how it is. Barney makes a ton of money and we won’t ever really explain why or what he does. When people ask, he’s like, ’’Please.’’ And that’s the end of it.

The episode with Lily moving into his apartment was great.

But there again I was worried like, Ooh, are we revealing too much about Barney? His apartment’s wicked cool, why don’t they hang out at his place? Why are they always at Ted and Marshall’s? [Laughs] We’ll leave that to the bloggers.

There are HIMYiM bloggers?

Oh yeah. They do their own little podcast.

Do you do the egosurfing now?

Yeah. [But] I won’t write about myself in the third person. I won’t defend myself. You won’t post comments?

I think that’s bad karma.

[The waiter comes to tell him to eat his sandwich, because he’s not.]

I had that stomach staple surgery, so I have to eat little meals. Oh shoot, did I just say that out loud?

Last summer, Neil Patrick Harris was obese!

Not obese. I’m just worried about it.

Pre-emptive stomach stapling?

Yeah!

How long can you sustain being Barney?

As long as they’ll have me. I love this job.

And you’re not worried that now for the rest of your career you’re a boob?

No. ’Cause my education was of a more subtle nature. [Doogie creator Stephen] Bochco’s stuff was very layered and interesting and subtle. And so doing this I still have that to fall back on, I hope. I like to plate spin, you know? I’m a plate spinner. Get this one going... You’ve seen it! [he starts acting it out, singing a carnival song] Yah-da-dada-da... and then you go back over here! Gotta do some theater! Okay, that’s going... TV’s going good... now I need a little movie... what about the directing plate?!

Which plate’s wobbling the most right now?

What a question! Wobbling? Probably film. Hard to say. I’m incredibly content right now.

What do you have in film land at the moment?

Harold and Kumar. And then I’ve got a couple opportunities to do some smallish roles in interesting smaller movies and then kind of roll the dice and hope that they become interesting bigger movies. That would be my dream plan, to do a couple days here and there in one or two interesting smaller movies. Cause you don’t want to be known only as being the triple-take, pratfall, spit-take guy.

What is your favorite thing that you’ve gotten to do on HIMYiM?

Um... Well, I think I’m gonna get to do something in two weeks. I think Barney’s gonna try and track down his birth father. And I’m incredibly excited about what I get to do that week. I don’t know that I’m allowed to talk about it.

Oh, just tell me. Who’s playing your birth father? Do you find him?

I seek him out, yes. And it couldn’t be written for someone better than me. It’s perfect. It’s what Neil loves.

So there’s magic...

Magic, game shows... it might fit in somewhere in those categories. I haven’t filmed it yet so I can’t say, but it might be the greatest day of my life.

Wow.

We’re not filming on lot. We’re going somewhere else to film.

Is Howie Mandel involved?

I hope not. [Laughs]

I guess then in terms of you being very happy on the show - it leads to the announcement of your sexual preference. You came out in November. How is that changing the roles that are coming your way? Is it?

No. I’m not being thrown roles any time, ever, really. Because I’m working on the show so much.

I just assumed you had a stack of tie-wearing womanizing a—hole scripts...

And now I look at the pile and it’s empty and there’s just crickets?

Yeah.

No, things are cool. The fact that all that was under incredible Internet scrutiny was interesting to observe as a third person. To watch it manifest itself in truth and lies and see where it went and what people were saying was very interesting. But I was appreciative of it being sort of a non-story. People were either like ’’Eh,’’ or they were like, ’’Oh really? Eh.’’ So it hasn’t really changed much work-wise. My life is almost drama-free.

Did you feel like you were forced to do something?

I’m an actor, playing roles. And the less you know about me, the more you’ll believe who I’m playing. So, I had a vested interest to not talk a lot about my personal life, and I still won’t. I think I’m allowed to sort of stand taller now in my personal life, just because I’m not constantly kind of wondering if people are murmuring. I just honestly feel like I’m not a very scandalous person. I’m a professional actor. That’s my job. I don’t aspire for celebrity. I aspire for job security. Does that make sense?

It does. But you say job security... are the executives still worried about this s---?

I can’t speak to the executives. They keep hiring me for jobs, and all I can do is represent myself well. Who you end up falling in love with is a personal decision. And how you choose to let that unfold is entirely up to you.

But do you think there’s a double standard between the way they let straight actors play gay roles but can’t accept gay actors as straight?

No. I think gay actors play straight roles all the time. But there is certainly an understood fantasy of an audience wanting to watch someone and think that they could have a chance with them. That’s why I think the less you know, the better. Honestly.

Are you in a relationship?

Yes.

Is it one that’s lasted through this whole thing, or one that’s happened since?

With that, I’d definitely stick to: I don’t like to talk about my private life.

Are you happy?

Very. Couldn’t be more happy.

Did you in fact get a dog when you moved out here?

Yes! We have two dogs. A Cairn terrier named Fred, and a Labradoodle-ish white dog named Watson. And they are the most adorable and loving things you’ll ever meet in your life.

How much longer do you want to be in the biz?

I think I’ll make a shift to directing in the next five years. Which is like the greatest job ever. Because you’re helming a ship, you know? You get to have script meetings, you get to write stuff, you get to have pre-production, you get to be in the casting room, you get to edit it, you get to screen it... it’s a much bigger project.

Do you have dream projects that you want to direct?

You know what one of mine was? The Prestige. I found that book at like an old magic convention, and I read it and I thought, This is amazing! ’Cause I’m obsessed with the stage magicians from the turn of the century. But I knew it was a period piece about stage magicians at the turn of the century. You could never make it, unless you were someone as kickass as Christopher Nolan. So when I heard he was doing it, I was like, Damn that guy! He’s perfect! I loved it, it was great.

Barney is certainly mysterious.

There’s a lot of mystery in him. And he’ll do magic. He’ll make a dove appear. Just don’t ask for more.

Will Arnett kind of cornered the magic market on Arrested Development, though.

I know!!! As much as I love that show I was thrilled when it was cancelled so that I could be the only guy doing magic on TV. That was a great show. That’s a show that makes you want to do TV. You get to be this hilarious person and they keep writing new stuff for you. I’m like a wicked fun standup comic, but I don’t have to come up with my own material. And then next week, Friday comes around, and I get a new script and it’s like, Oh, look what I get to do this week! It does not suck.