Five Interesting Minutes with Neil Patrick Harris

After Doogie Howser, M.D., America’s favorite teenaged doctor retired and Neil Patrick Harris, the star of the show, slipped into relative obscurity, taking refuge, in large part, on the stage and doing voice work for cartoons. Oh, and then there was his role in Starship Troopers we’re still trying to forget. In 2004, though, everything changed when Harris was cast as a coke-snorting, sexed-up version of himself in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. The role directly led to him being cast as Barney on How I Met Your Mother. This week, he returns as himself, or NPH as he is now known, in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I sat down with him a few weeks ago to talk about the role, his evolving career, and Starship Troopers.

Cole Haddon: There are more than a few folks walking around the press day sporting "What Would NPH Do?" t-shirts. Is that weird for you?

Neil Patrick Harris: See, I love that element of it.

CH: Really?

NPH: Oh yeah. Because I’m playing a part that’s me, but it’s not me, but it might be. I love blurring those lines. I think the goal of a good actor is to maintain a level of privacy that allows people to not know much about them, who they are as real people –- so you’re able to morph into the villain, or morph into the dad, or morph into the cop, or whatever. It there’s too much revealed about you, then that’s what people think you are and, when you play opposite that type, people don’t accept it. It’s sort of the magician mentality.

CH: Between Doogie Howser and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, you worked a lot, on stage and on the small and big screens, but you had really slipped off the mainstream radar. Did that period, almost a decade, prepare you or even help you enjoy more this second renaissance of your career?

NPH: I’m a big fan of the process of work. I like working. It was a strange period and a necessary period to wait before sets of waves know –- or at least assume –- more waves will come your way. To be willing to tread water for a while. For me, that was happening at the same time my body was changing and I was becoming an adult. I just knew I shouldn’t rush into it. I was never one to crave the fame element of it. The fact that there’s a website called Whatwouldnphdo.com confuses me more than makes me want more of it.

CH: Have you visited the site at all?

NPH: [Laughs, embarrassed]. I’ve been on it a lot, but it’s so weird.

CH: Back to the question about what you learned from being out of the public eye in the '90s...

NPH: I’m very conscientious of trying to shape a career out of this. But as an actor, you can’t so much. There are many steps I would’ve loved to have taken and jobs I would’ve liked to have gotten. So you take the ones you can get and hope they have good content or a heightened level of quality, and see where that takes you. I think I owe a lot of [this attitude] to the theatre. [The stage] teaches you a lot about patience because you fail as much as you succeed, night after night on stage.

CH: Is that how you explain Starship Troopers? They make fun of it a bit in Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

NPH: [Smirks]. Well, he was very reverential toward it.

CH: Not everyone is cool with making fun of their past, especially in this business. They like to pretend it away and hope nobody brings it up, even though Jay Leno will find a clip and embarrass you with it at some point.

NPH: Yeah, I’m an adult now. It was a little tougher when I was younger because I didn’t want to sound like the spilled-milk guy, willing to make jokes about my past so I would look like the new guy in the future. But I’ve worked long enough now that I think I can comment on my past without seeming like an asshole. It’s a tricky, fine line between commenting on your past and talking trash about yourself, which kind of makes you look unhappy about your work and there’s no way I’d ever talk disparagingly about [Doogie Howser, M.D.] or Steven Bochco or any of that chapter because that was a phenomenal chapter for me. It was four years of single-camera work with the guy who did Hill Street Blues and LA Law. The fact that the name stuck with me was, for a time, an annoyance, but I was also trying to figure out who I was and that didn’t help. But now that I’m grown up, it’s part of who I was. So if they want to talk about Starship Troopers… [laughs]

We want to talk smack about Starship Troopers, too. We’re still smarting from losing those two hours from our lives, but…well, NPH has learned his lesson obviously. Next time he’s offered a Starship Troopers-grade loser, we know what he’ll do.

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