My Q&A w/Neil Patrick Harris (Part 1)

This is the first part of an interview I did recently with Neil Patrick Harris who plays the womanizing Barney on CBS' hit sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" and who appears in the upcoming sequel to "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle."

Q. Is Barney gonna settle down?
A. "Oh, I hope never. I hope that never happens. If Barney settles down, we really jump the shark. Maybe in year seven.

Q. Is Wayne Brady (who plays Barney's gay brother) going to be coming back? He was a riot.
A. "He's done a couple of episodes already so I'm sure that if they wrote him in and his schedule was free he'd love to play. He's a great friend of the show."

Q. Of course everybody wants to know how it was having Britney Spears as a guest star recently.
A. "You saw her work on the show was very strong, it was a good week for us ratings-wise. But we're big fans of the content of the show and I hope we don't get into a situation where we're having to rely ob guest cast in order to get people to watch the show. But if every now and again someone comes on and gets a million more or so people to watch it, our hats are off to them."

Q. Did the first "Harold and Kumar" movie really change everything for you because people started to see you differently?
A. "It added a new wrinkle to my career, definitely. I was much squeakier and cleaner before that and post 'Harold and Kumar,' I think people figure me as a comic foil which I think is a much more enjoyable place to be."

Q. How is everything going for you professionally now? Do you have more offers than you can possibly take in TV, movies and theater?"Things are great, yeah. Doing a TV show takes up more than half the year and maybe you can squeeze a film in there if you can. But it's also nice to take a month off just to re-energize. But then the year is starting up again and I'm missing out on theater for no other reason than just scheduling. I would love to do a play or a musical or something but that's like a year's commitment."

Tomorrow, Neil talks a bit about his personal life...