Neil Patrick Harris I love puzzles. He loves games. He designed the single-player board game Box One. He plays Wordle every day and consistently scores three points. A seasoned magician, he enjoys magical tricks. All issues of his newsletter, Wonder Cade, Comes with some riddle. His personality is fizz and bounce, with a touch of guilt. He tends to look like he’s doing something. He has something fun.
his Hamptons houseI visited on a ridiculously perfect Sunday these days — did he somehow play the weather game? — Lots of jokes, fake outs and pranks. These start with the front door mat and never actually stop. (Sure, there’s an indoor slide.) The pouch with the screen we talked to was adorned with a huge Jenga set. Other games remained in a nearby trolley.
But the game that 49-year-old Harris plays like no other is his own career game. As a genius boy Doogie Howser, a child actor, he managed the transition to adult work relatively gracefully. And when he came out as gay In a sunny statement issued to the people, His career never narrowed or diminished. He is now, if anything, even more loved. And with his husband, David BarkaAs an actor and cookbook author who was in the kitchen preparing homemade carrots in eight different ways when I arrived, he became a symbol of gay homeliness.
While many actors face limited opportunities, Harris continues to star in comedies, dramas and musicals. He played a girly boy slip from communist East Berlin in his hero, villain, straight romantic lead, unrepentant Libertine, and Broadway debut in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” As the host of the demanding award show, he plays himself in a flashy black tie version. In the Harold and Kumar films, he plays another version. Hedonists become greedy with strippers and ride unicorns.
“he teeth “Unicorn,” said Pamela Fryman, a longtime friend and director who worked with Harris on “How I Met Your Mother.” “In every possible way.”
of “Disconnected” Harris, an eight-episode comedy of Darren Star and Jeffrey Richman, who debuts on Netflix on July 29, will try a new trick that is an old trick that hasn’t been tried since Dougie’s time. He plays an intimate role. To the person he is actually.
“It was like entering a’sliding door’version of my life,” he described his role in a 1998 movie in which the main character of Gwyneth Paltrow moves into another future. “There was nothing so close to my adult version.”
Harris starred as elite real estate broker Michael (sometimes literally with some pitfalls) when his 17-year partner Colin (Tuc Watkins) left without warning or explanation. Throughout the series, Michael moves through stages of sadness — denial, anger, negotiation, depression, and acceptance. From time to time he moves them all between a single text message thread configured behind a taxi.
Again, that’s not all sadness. “I ended up living this other version. What if I was single in New York and had a Grindr account? That’s what I don’t do,” Harris said. “So it was also a kind of cheeky and sneaky.”
Stars and Richman didn’t write pilots with certain actors in mind. But when it was time to cast the show, they knew they wanted Harris. “Neil was our very, very, very first choice,” Star said in a video call from France. (He was filming “Emily in Paris” in Provence. Hard life.)
They wanted him not only for his talent and appearance, but also for his popularity, which wanted the comedy not to feel overly niche. (Are you still worried about the appeal of gay romantic comedies in the post “Fire Island” and “Love, Simon” worlds? Apparently.)
“He is so loved by so many people,” the star said of Harris. “He’s very mainstream.” The creators wanted everyone to have a relationship with Michael. “Heterosexuals and homosexuals, men and women, everyone,” said the star. If Harris played him, they would.
With Harris on board, they wrote the rest of the episodes, and those episodes were improved in the pilot. This is what others who worked with Harris have always told me. His talent and his work ethic free the people around him to do the best job.
“He was even more talented than I expected,” said Barry Sonnenfeld, a showrunner in “A series of unfortunate events.” He helped create some song and dance numbers just for Harris. “How I Met Your Mother” also gave him a serial number.
“He opens your world in the way you can write anything and you know what he offers,” Flyman told me.
Harris does not sing “Uncoupled” or dance solo. But he did some of his stunts. This includes stunts that fall behind the mountain. And he can easily balance deep sorrow, cheeky sex scenes, and exaggerated comedy.
“Basically to have an actor who can do whatever you throw at him, we stepped up our game and urged him to give him the best material we can do,” Star said. Said. “Because we know he can play it.”
Harris explained to me that he was a technical actor, not an introspective actor. He is a craftsman, not a psychologist. (As a kid, he wanted to be a stuntman at Universal Studios. He still wants this, so that’s the mountain.) A villain who loves the disguise of “A Series of Unfortunate”, You can see the craftsmanship in his past roles like Count Olaf. Rotario’s Bernie, who played in “Event”, or “How I Met Your Mother,” could somehow avoid it by putting a pointed pause in the middle of the word “legendary.” It’s done.
Harris also enjoys ridiculous personal charm and boyish beauty. He called those good looks crutches and then corrected himself. “Weird albatrosses,” he said. But for some roles, that’s enough.
Michael needed something more, something to counter the pitfalls and the jacuzzi vomiting scene. So Harris did what he rarely did: he personalized that part. He went home and imagined what it would be like to find his 18-year-old partner Burtka leaving him.
The act of imagination and the way he applied it to the role was “very open”, he said, “very, very vulnerable.” (Around this time, Barka looked into the room and showed me a bag of produce in the garden, so he took a bus home and seemed to rob some of the farm stalls. Where did he go? It doesn’t seem to be.)
Harris usually does not have access to such openness. Perhaps he spent much of his twenties maintaining a careful boundary between personal and professional life. He was always guessing himself, wondering if he should cross his legs and how to drink. He was walking on the red carpet apart from his date.
“I was restraining my freedom because I was worried that I might give something or someone would look through my guise,” he said. Things changed when he came out and turned 33. “I was definitely able to exhale and get taller,” he said.
My friend also noticed. “I think he wondered,” said Brooks Ashmanskas, a “unbound” co-star who has known Harris for nearly 20 years.
Over the years, he has removed some of those boundaries. His 11 year old twins helped. “I’m a dad now, so I’m suffering from vulnerabilities with my kids,” he said. All of this allowed him to infuse his very personal fears and fears into his role.
However, some boundaries remain. I asked him a few questions about whether “uncoupling” makes sense for LGBTQ representations if he feels pressured to maintain a poster boy persona. He answered in the most common language, but it was so warm and polite that he didn’t seem to avoid it in particular. If he had sharper or intimate answers, he kept them to himself.
“I will be the most successful representative by maintaining a non-political position,” he said. “I want people to see me as an expression of positivity. I want people to see my work without prejudice,” he said.
So this is another of his games. If you look at “Uncoupled” and look at its naked emotions, you can see that the sorcerer peels off the curtain and shows how the trick is done. Finally, is this a real Harris? But when a magician does that, it really only complicates the trick. Its on-screen vulnerabilities obscure other Harris devices. His showmanship, slightly crazy work ethic (partly due to impostor syndrome), and a very busy brain calculate an infinite sequence of intonations, gestures, and expressions. Then the camera will switch on and everything will be easy to see.
“Part of his magic is the work he does. Behind the door over there,” Flyman told me. “He doesn’t need you to see the piece. He needs you to sit in the audience and be overwhelmed by the performance.”
In other words, Harris always has something. That afternoon in the Hamptons, he wore a snug, short-sleeved blue polo shirt. Just before I left, he pulled the cloth over his left biceps to show me a fresh tattoo — the magician’s hat that the rabbit was looking into. The rabbit had three hearts for Barka and her children. Then he put his sleeve back on.
“I’m also a magician and I believe in the spirit of a magician,” he said. “You don’t have to know everything to everyone at all times.”
