Neil Patrick Harris: April 2008 Archives

I caught Neil Patrick Harris' appearance on "Regis and Kelly" Monday morning and he was his usual funny and charming self. He's so good on talk shows. He compliments Kelly Ripa on her ripped bod first calling her Linda Hamilton then saying "You look like Madonna. Look at those guns!"

Regis asked about NPH's sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" which is on a ratings upswing and should be easily renewed for a fourth season. But, the actor said "We're not yet, our fingers are crossed. They make you sweat it out. It's a big business, television, so you can never be too confident."

Then the conversation segued into the reason why Neil is burning up the talk show circuit: he co-stars in "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantamano Bay" which opens on Friday. He plays an actor named Neil Patrick Harris but, he said, it's "sort of a very extreme version of myself...I'm on hallucinegenic mushrooms and take the boys to a house of ill-repute. It's good, wholesome entertainment."

They showed a clip of the film with NPH driving Harold and Kumar who question his ability to drive in his drug-induced state. His reply is a reference to Doogie: "Dude, I was able to perform an appentectomy at 14, I think I can handle a couple of mushrooms...Did you see that unicorn?"

Neil Patrick Harris issued a clarification of comments he made about Britney Spears guessing on "How I Met Your Mother," the CBS sitcom which Harris is one of the stars. Here's what he said to an AP last week: 'We've done a good three and three-quarter seasons with guest stars that we feel like are exactly perfect for the characters that (were) written ... by the crack writing staff,'' Harris told a reporter visiting the set of the Monday night CBS sitcom. ''I worry that if they start 'Will and Gracing' us too much, that the show will suffer. And we're all really proud of the content of the show. I mean viewership is not our game. It's the network and the studio's game, you know. It's the promotion department's game. We wish we weren't opposite an awkward reality dancing competition. But we have no say about that. I just am a real fan of our content. I think we have a great show going and I hope it's not screwed up by the desire for 700,000 more viewers.'

This resulted in these kinds of headlines: "Neil Patrick Harris: Say No To Britney!"

I don't know if NPH got grief from the netwoek suits over this but he did feel compelled to issue the following statement: "It seems that yesterday a writer took some quotes of mine and speculated an opinion about their intent. I write to you to set the record straight. "As I have said all along, Britney did a great job on the show. She really did. In fact, we are all hoping that she returns rather soon to reprise her role as Abby. Look, that episode garnered our highest ratings of the season -- I would never ignore or disrespect that fact. I am just very protective of our show, and its content. I have a high standard of quality, and hope to maintain it on every level. Television is big business, I understand that. I have great faith in our casting department, as well as [Twentieth Century Fox Television] and CBS, to find the appropriate person for every role on our show. I was remiss in speculating otherwise. My job description is to act, and I should really do just that. "Britney Spears fits into our make-believe world very well -- if she chose to return I can only imagine that Carter [Bays], Craig [Thomas], and the rest of the writers would create a humdinger of a storyline for her. We should be so lucky.

AP also released a statement: "We're issuing a clarification to our story. Harris did not say that he opposed a return engagement for Spears, and our lead said that he did."

Well, that clears that up. I hope everyone feels better now!

Q. You've been famous since you were very young. But how has it been to have more attention focused on your personal life with \[paprazzi\] snapping your picture whenever you leave the house?
A. "Well actually, your statement's not accurate. People have just not cared that much about it which I think is probably the best results to the lack of scandal. It was a story that came out based on not much, it was a supposition story, there was no seedy night that happened that created a story. It was just a long-winded game of blogger telephone and I just sort of had to set the record straight and by doing so, it sorta squelched fires then it was not a story like it was in the beginning.
"People don't chase me around now. I think they might have chased me around had I not made a statement because then they would be looking for irrefutable proof of blankety-blank. My life is not that scandalous."

Q. Do you and (boyfriend David Burkta) want to do some projects together down the road?
A. "He should be able to have a career on his terms and not my terms. So I don't think either one of us have a desire for him to ride any kind of career coattail. He's very, very talented and deserves to be known for doing things independent of me. We're real conscious of trying to not make that a bigger thing."

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...

When I gabbed with Neil Patrick Harris Saturday night, he said he really isn't bothered by paparazzi. "People don't chase me around," he said. "I think they might have chased me around had I not made any kind of statement (about being gay) because then they would have been looking for irrefutable proof of blankety blank. My life's not that scandalous."

My complete interview with Neil will run in two parts next week beginning Monday!

I had a ringside seat for the 40th Annual Academy of Magical Arts Awards show on Saturday night at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and it was certainly worth putting on my tuxedo for. I didn't know much about this great entertainment tradition but sure learned a lot about it over the course of a very entertaining evening. There were plenty of celebrity presenters mixed in with performances of various magicians who did some amazing tricks that I couldn't even begin to wrap my head around.

You also know it's gonna be a fun awards show when among the celebs on stage are Neil Patrick Harris and Bruce Vilanch.

Neil to Bruce: "There's a lot more to show business than just doing tricks!"
Bruce: "This is not what Bette Midler told me."

Later, the famously overweight and shaggy-haired Bruce (wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Big Boned") suddenly noticed his image being projected on a large video screen and said: "That's a very scary close up. I look like Anna Nicole's mother!"

Jason Alexander performed a magic trick with Loni Anderson and also provided some comic relief by taking the stage on several occasions to poke fun at some of anything and everything including the ballroom's sound system: "I sound like I'm ground control at NASA" and the unfortunate height of the podium: "I like when I'm standing here in front of a roomful of people, to be able to rest my nipples."

I was seated at the same table near the stage as Rose Marie, the great star of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Hollywood Squares" and scores of other TV shows. She addressed the crowd from the table, told a few stories, and described the castle as "the most wonderful place in the world...I have worked with every damned magician and that goes way back...I had a magician come over to me and say, 'You worked with my father' and he was 80 years old!

I started the evening on the red carpet chatting up the various celebs on hand including a gorgeous Loni Anderson, actor Bruce Davison who was Oscar-nominated for "Longtime Companion," Bob Barker, Julie Newmar and several others. My interviews with them will be popping up on the site in the coming days and weeks. Also there were Tippi Hedren, June Lockhart, and Hal Sparks, among others.

As the start of dinner grew closer, there was a bit of a red carpet log jam. Jason Alexander and I had been trying to connect but he kept getting pulled away then when he was finally ready, I was deep in conversation with Neil Patrick Harris. So what did this great star of "Seinfeld," the Broadway stage and films do? He casually leans against a wall and waits a good five minutes for me to finish with NHP.

While Jason was a great sport, the same cannot be said of David Krumholtz who stars in the CBS drama "Numb3rs" as a crime-solving math professor. I've never seen the show so I didn't recognize Krumholtz right off the bat but saw him being interviewed by a few people and was curious. So when he walked by, I (gasp!) asked him his name.
A star of his magnitude clearly was not pleased: "What a question," he snapped. "I'm not gonna answer that." Then he walked away shaking his head in that "Can you believe that guy?" kinda way. I was still curious so I asked the TV reporter who had just finished interviewing him before my David Spade-like "SNL" moment ("And you are???") and the TV dude said: "I don't know his name but he was in "10 Things I Hate About You." So OK, I've since looked up his credits. He's done many TV shows and feature films including playing Bernard the elf in "The Santa Clause" and its first sequel. Ironically, one of his other movie credits is 2005's "Guess Who."