ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you feel like there was a point recently where, commercially, you decided to throw yourself out there again? Ramp up your career?
NEIL PATRICK HARRIS: 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.
NEXT PAGE: The origins — and mysteries — of Barney, and pre-emptive stomach stapling
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