Neil Patrick Harris Rewatches How I Met Your Mother, Doogie Howser, Uncoupled & More

♪ Now Dr. Horrible is here ♪

♪ To make you quake with fear ♪

♪ To make the whole world kneel ♪

Neil.

Nice. [high-pitched tone]

Hi, my name is Neil Patrick Harris,

and I am going to be revisiting

some scenes from my career.

Shall we?

['80s style music]

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

You know, when I was a little kid, I was sick too.

I was real sick.

What was wrong with you?

I had a disease called acute leukemia.

[Neil laughs]

I got it first when I was four

and then I had it again when I was six.

That was from the pilot of Doogie Howser, MD.

The first episode we ever made.

I remember it so vividly,

because it was a big chapter in my life.

It was a big moment

of suddenly I'm doing a television show.

Steven Bochco was a big deal.

He had done LA Law.

He had done a show called Hill Street Blues,

and that scene was one of my audition scenes.

So not only do I remember that scene,

but I remember rehearsing that singular scene

and doing it in audition rooms.

I remember the rigors of it.

I was only allowed to work eight and a half hours a day

and then three hours had to be school.

So I remember having to be very compartmentalized

in my life at a very young age.

I also am amazed at my hair.

It's kind of not dissimilar today.

Throwback. OG.

When am I gonna get my new heart?

It's hard to say.

Could be today or tomorrow or next week.

Depends on when they get one.

There's a confidence to my pacing in this scene.

I think I was directed to slow it down a bit, right?

I'm talking to a boy who's probably going to pass away

and is needing a heart transplant,

and so it needed to be a quiet, calm scene.

In fact, I think

later on in this episode,

he had died.

So this was kind of the last scene

of us together.

In contemporary television,

there would be a lot more shots and edits

and it would be faster paced.

So I kind of love how staid and still it all was,

and sitting on a performance.

Where do they get it from?

[Doogie] The truth?

From a kid who dies.

I'm scared.

Don't be.

Getting a new heart's gonna be so prime.

I was pretty good back at that little age,

doing some subtle acting.

My nuts hadn't dropped,

so my voice was really high,

but I think it would've been more awkward

if you'd have watched that

and I was talking like this.

[in deep voice] It's okay, Billy, when you get a heart,

it's gonna be so prime.

It said prime?

Was that one?

Was that a thing you said back then?

I dunno.

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

[Harold] Is that a hitchhiker? What the hell?

Should we pick him up?

[Neil laughs sardonically]

I know this scene well.

We are not picking up a hitchhiker, man!

Hey, guys. Thanks for picking me up.

Oh, oh.

Excuse me, are you Neil Patrick Harris?

Yep.

Jon and Hayden, who wrote Harold & Kumar trilogy,

they were fans of Doogie Howser, maybe,

back in the day.

So they wrote me in it,

and I think in their minds,

they didn't think

that I would ever want to do their movie.

Then a friend of mine

was auditioning for a role in the movie and said,

I'm gonna be in this movie that you're doing.

And I had no idea what he was talking about.

He said, you're in this movie,

Harold & Kumar Get the Munchies,

I think it was called at the time.

I said, Well, that makes no sense,

'cause I'd love to be in a movie.

I'm in this movie?

And he said, Yeah, dude.

So then I panicked,

'cause I thought I was gonna be

just the butt of a joke in a movie.

I was conflicted.

I called my agent.

They sent me the script.

I read the script

and it was funny.

I met with them.

They were super cool,

and I said I'd happily do their movie.

I put a rider in my contract

that they couldn't do any comedy about me

without me approving it.

I'm pretty protective of the Doogie Howser canon,

and I stand by the content of that show.

So I didn't want Harold & Kumar

to make it seem like I was disrespectful of my past.

Dude, Doogie Howser, MD

was like my favorite show growing up.

You were my idol.

Yeah. That's great.

Can we get going? I'm bored as shit back here.

Go, go. Let's go.

This is a fricking boring spot.

And look at that, three days work

and my whole career took a nice pivot.

So I gotta ask you, Neil,

did you ever get it on with Wanda off the set?

Dude, I humped every piece of ass ever on that show.

Even the chick who played the hot nurse?

No,

I didn't go all the way with her.

Neil, you wouldn't happen to know

how to get on the highway from here, would you?

Dude, I don't even know where the fuck I am right now.

I was at this party earlier tonight

and some guy hooked me up with this incredible X.

Next thing I know, I'm being thrown out of a moving car.

I've been tripping balls ever since.

I'm amazed when I watch it,

how I had clearly done ecstasy before.

Not a lot, but I had a couple times,

'cause I'm doing the sort of jaw-clenchy...

I closed one eye.

I don't know even how I did that.

That's weird.

Anyway, it worked for the scene.

I think we were just filming it

in a black curtain space

and they were exhausted.

John and Kal.

They'd been filming this movie, working nights,

and then in comes

[imitates guns firing]

Neil Patrick Harris,

shooting guns with his fingers.

[imitates guns firing]

Then I sit down

and they were exhausted

and I just wanted to make them laugh.

So when I leaned in and said,

Lap dance,

that was to try and get John to laugh

because when you can make John Cho laugh,

you feel special and happy inside.

Yeah dude, you fascinate me.

Forget White Castle.

Let's go get some pussy.

Huh?

It's a fuckin' sausage-fest in here, bro.

Let's get us some poontang.

Then we'll go to White Castle.

No, Neil, you don't understand.

We've been craving these burgers all night.

Yeah. I've been craving burgers too.

Fur burgers.

Harold & Kumar, for some weird reason,

was kind of a career-altering professional move for me.

That wasn't something that was intentional.

I think that people had seen me

and thought that I was Doogie Howser from TV.

I didn't really have any baggage with that.

As I said before, I'm proud of it.

But I think people assumed

that because I played him

that I would be sensitive to it.

But then by doing Harold & Kumar

and talking about it,

being meta about it,

it really seemed to clear the air,

as far as my past,

and allowed people to see me

embracing a new direction of myself.

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

Are you all right?

Hold on.

It's okay.

Captain Hammer will save us.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

I think, one of the very first scripted internet shows.

Musical, directed by and created by Joss Whedon.

It was released in three different parts,

three acts,

three subsequent weeks on iTunes,

'cause there was no real streaming services

at that time.

I still think, just as a piece of art,

it is one of the best things I've ever done.

It's one of two things I go back and watch

when I'm sad

and feeling worthless.

I'll watch Dr. Horrible,

and it's just really, really good.

♪ Here lies everything ♪

♪ The world I wanted at my feet ♪

♪ My victory's complete ♪

♪ So hail to the king ♪

♪ Everything you ever ♪

♪ Arise and see ♪

Yeah. Billy is someone

who's desperate to be noticed.

In this world, there's heroes and there's villains.

Then there's the henchmen and sidekicks.

So he thinks he can be,

'cause he's mad at all of the people who are bullying him,

he'll just become a super-villain.

But in order to become the villain he wants to be,

the person that he loves has to die.

When you hear the chorus of girls,

they're singing

♪ Everything you ever ♪

Which is like everything he ever wanted,

this is what happens.

This is what happens.

You get what you want,

and now you're empty.

I like they let me do stuff with Billy.

I played him with like a tick,

like twitchy,

because he had a bunch of scenes

that Joss had wonderfully written

where he kept wanting to say the right thing,

but then messing up.

So it felt like a long blink for me

was kind of like a reset.

Like, No, don't say that, and Say that instead.

The nice thing about having an annoying tick

is that you can find a time when it goes away.

So I think the cold reality

of who he is now

makes it all go away.

[brooding music]

[Captain Hammer cry talking]

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

was filmed

and created

because a writers' strike had happened.

So everything shut down,

but Joss wanted to make content anyway.

He wrote this thing singularly

and we made it during the writers' strike.

I think we barely got paid.

It wasn't about that, right?

It was about doing something kick-ass for Joss.

It was just very bare bones,

and it was just crazy.

We filmed some of those shots

where someone was holding

like a stereo,

playing a track,

while someone else was just holding a camera,

while I was walking, doing a single shot.

And that was the one time we did it.

That's the one shot we used.

It was kind of weird artistic perfection.

♪ Now Dr. Horrible is here ♪

♪ To make you quake with fear ♪

♪ To make the whole world kneel ♪

Neil.

Nice.

♪ And I won't feel ♪

♪ A thing ♪

The last shot of it is really interesting.

I think it's intentionally vague

and sort of up for interpretation.

Are you flashing back to what he's hopeful for?

Are you flashing forward to who he is

when he's not Dr. Horrible

and recognizing,

or is he just a sad visage of someone

who started out without dark circles under his eyes?

And who's nice blogging, you know,

and then in turn, he's just kind of dark and dead?

So I'm not quite sure, to be honest,

what one's interpretation of that might be.

For me, it was just like

it takes the wind out of your lungs

to think, Oh, wow.

That's the price of internet success.

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

You have to choose

right now.

Me or the suits.

[piano music builds]

♪ I know what you're thinking: ♪

♪ What's Barney been drinking? ♪

♪ That girl was smoking hot ♪

That was my favorite episode, obvs,

of How I Met Your Mother,

episode 100 called Girls vs. Suits.

We wanted to do something very exciting

for the 100th episode.

I think was the end of the fourth season of the show.

It was just a joy. It was just a joy.

♪ Yes, I could have nailed her ♪

♪ But no, it's not a failure ♪

♪ 'Cause there's one thing she is not ♪

♪ To score a 10 would be just fine ♪

♪ But I'd rather be dressed to the nines ♪

I wanted to fill in every little bit.

So even just like that second shot,

walking down and then holding my hand up

and having the lint brush stick into your hand,

we had to do that 11 times,

'cause I'm not looking at the hand.

I'm not looking at where it's being thrown.

I'm just holding my hand out.

So, you know, you'd be cocky,

confident, singing it,

and then you go like this

and it would go [mimics cartoony noise]

and you'd miss it.

We filmed that at 20th Century Fox.

It had a big, proper back lot back in the day.

It was really just two streets.

Pam Fryman, who directed that and was our boss,

she wanted to shoot every element of it.

So if you look at that,

you can see just shot-for-shot,

they just used every section.

♪ It's a truth you can't refute ♪

♪ Nothing suits me like a suit ♪

Carter and Craig, who are musicians

as well as writers, wrote the song.

They were in a band before they became writers.

So we incorporated music as much as possible

in the show.

They'd pitch you the ideas about a month before,

and say, We've got this idea

in the writer's room that we're thinking about doing.

What do you think about this?

And I was,

that was a big fat yes.

How I Met Your Mother at season four

was just still kind of an on-the-bubble show.

Every year, we were not sure

if we were gonna get picked up.

You'd kind of wait and see.

But at season four,

that means you're about 100 episodes.

That means you get to be in syndication.

So if you can get four seasons, at least back then,

then they would wanna do season five and season six

because it's gonna be on in reruns all over the place.

So then they're gonna want to bank more shows.

So you knew that you were on the road to something good

if you got to season four,

and we were still sort of in an up trajectory.

It was celebratory in more than one way.

♪ Girls will go ♪

♪ And girls will come ♪

♪ But there's only one absolute ♪

♪ Every bro on the go needs to know ♪

♪ That there's no accepted substitute ♪

One thing I've never mentioned before,

that is a fun fact,

is that this is a CBS network show.

I asked them to reverse one set of the lyrics.

At the beginning of that big number,

when I say, Come on, Lily, get your head out of your ass.

2, 3, 4.

And he goes,

[vocalizes beats]

It was, Girls will come and girls will go,

but there's only one absolute.

And I thought, because it would be dirtier,

that we reverse that.

So instead, I sing, Girls will go and girls will come,

but there's only one absolute,

and it was very sexual.

I don't think they ever knew

that that was intentional.

We got to say on CBS that girls will come,

which,

bonus.

♪ I'm sorry, suits ♪

♪ Let's make amends ♪

♪ My Sunday best are my best friends ♪

The hardest part of that

was probably the big final scene

with everyone dancing.

I jump up on the top of a taxi.

I don't think I was supposed to spin,

'cause it's not a lot of real estate,

and if I missed that spin,

no one's gonna catch me except the concrete.

I did the spin anyway.

Then we all had to come forward

in great choreography

with tons of people in suits.

It was a hot day

and we all had to do kick lines together.

Some of the cast are struggling more

with all of the specifics of the choreography

more than others,

Jason Segel.

So that was sort of fun to watch.

We'd have to do that multiple times

'cause people would...

Understandably. It was all happening very quickly.

♪ 'Cause nothing suits the undisputed ♪

♪ Oft-saluted suitor of repute ♪

♪ Like a ♪

Wait for it

When a musical sequence is filmed well,

and it goes correctly,

I think you're sort of overwhelmed

by the timings of everything.

Things just happen when they're supposed to.

People just enter all at the same time,

and the doors close on the beat, right?

You expect it,

'cause you're listening to a tempo, a rhythm,

but in point of fact,

that's really hard to execute.

So when you watch things like that,

there's so many little tiny things

that could hiccup and go wrong.

But when it's done well,

then it feels like a big musical number, you know,

as it's supposed to.

♪ Suit ♪

♪ Nothing suits him like a suit ♪

Then again, she is pretty hot.

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

[both panting]

[dress hits floor]

[shirt rips]

Go slowly.

But I want it.

This was from Gone Girl, David Fincher.

He's meticulous.

Multiple, multiple takes of every single shot.

And that was thrilling for me,

because it didn't feel like the performance

was given short shrift.

If you can literally break it down,

shot for shot, and see the symmetry

of everything.

It was just as gross and as nasty as it gets.

It still, to me, feels very Hitchcock-y and artistic.

[Amy panting]

Shh. Don't rush.

This scene was a challenge to film

in kind of a handful of ways.

We had to make it look like it was an actual sex scene,

meaning that it wasn't robotic.

David Fincher wanted us

to be doing everything exactly the same way

every single take,

so that when we flopped down on the bed,

he wanted to make sure we flopped down on the bed

at pretty much the exact same position every time.

Not 3:00 on the dial and then 12:00 on the dial,

but exactly 2:00 on the dial

so that when he's editing it,

he has multiple options.

'Cause if we do a great take and we're here,

but then we're over here in another one...

I can understand the logic behind it.

Normally, that's not a problem.

In a sex scene situation, it's weird,

because you wanna have the freedom

to be fooling around a bit.

So well before we shot this scene,

Rosamund Pike and I went into this set

with no crew around,

and David told us what he wanted us to do.

We sort of talked through it

and then he went somewhere else

and we just rehearsed it for like two, three hours,

over and over and over again.

He wanted this number of these

and this number of mouth thrusts

and everything was the same

every single time we did it.

And that was freaky and hard and a challenge,

but kind of exciting.

[dramatic music]

[both grunting]

[Desi moaning]

[ominous music]

Also a challenge to die on camera

and have it feel very realistic.

He was very intent

on what that would actually be like.

It's hard to manifest that performance,

'cause I've never died.

[ominous music] [Desi gasping]

Oh!

I don't know how you get your throat slit.

So I watched a bunch of videos of animals

who'd got their throats slit

and we sort of talked about it.

I think the timing of it is kind of genius,

because I get my throat slit mid-orgasm,

and it was very helpful in its own way

'cause I was mid-climax,

which allows me to be in kind of an aroused state of

[mimics orgasm]

then when that happens, apparently,

says people,

you don't feel anything when your throat is slit.

There's no pain

with a knife like that.

It was just a clean slice.

If anything, it would be almost more erotic

because you just feel a lot of warmth

and it would be only when you noticed a different color,

like he knew none of this was gonna happen, right?

He was in love with her.

Then all of a sudden he's looking down.

So if anything, the death is more,

What the fuck is happening?

while ejaculating,

while she then

forces her on top of him.

It's a garish scene.

But that was crazy.

We had to do that a few times.

We shot everything up until the blood stuff,

the wet work, probably 30-ish times.

[ominous music]

[Desi gurgles] [Amy grunting]

That room was a set.

All of the walls pulled back.

There were multiple bedding sets.

There were multiple rugs.

There were multiple outfits.

There was a tube that went up

to a fairly overt prosthetic piece

that was on my neck,

that they could digitally remove.

So then we would take it right from there

and it would start

and we would just carry it through.

Then as soon as we were done with it,

we would pause

and then everything would move back

and we'd stand up

and they'd completely redo the set

while we went and showered

and then covered ourselves with shaving cream

to keep ourselves from getting stained.

Then we'd get set,

get in position,

get ready and we'd do it again.

It was wild.

[ominous music]

Also, point of fact, that's not my dong.

There's one shot you can see

where I'm flipped over post coital.

And she hops off of me

and you see like a floppy dong.

That wasn't my real dong.

That's a digital dong

that David Fincher told me about

right before we went to the premiere of it in New York.

He said, Oh, by the way, your dong is in it.

It's not your dong.

It's a digital dong.

I didn't know that could happen.

Nice?

And he said, Yeah, it's good.

It's a good dong.

[high-pitched fast forwarding]

[Michael] This is who Colin left me for.

[Billy] Oh, he's cute.

How old is he?

He's not cute.

He's diabolical,

and that blonde hair looks like a dye job.

I wonder how I would look with blonde hair.

I feel like it would really pop on screen.

[Stanley] So how did you find out?

Suzanne.

She saw them together

moving into Colin's new apartment.

So that's a scene from Uncoupled,

my new Netflix show.

I play Michael, a guy who's in

a nice monogamous 17-year relationship

with his partner Colin.

On the 50th birthday party,

Colin announces right before he opens the door

that he's moved out and that he's left him.

Gut punch, door open, surprise!

That's kind of the show,

is my character, at 48 years old,

having to navigate a breakup in New York City,

where he didn't know what happened.

He has to figure out what happened.

Should he reconcile?

Should he start dating again?

What's dating like in a Grindr-y world?

What kind of friend tells you these things?

What was she gonna not tell me?

She saw them.

Wait, is that the hot guy you hate from work?

I think I follow him.

Then unfollow him.

It's from our company's Christmas party.

I introduced them.

That's cold; having an affair with someone from work.

Not an affair.

He left me for Tyler

then didn't have the balls to admit it.

This scene is fun because it's sort of...

It's a Darren Star show,

Darren Star and Jeffrey Richman did it.

Darren's famous for lots of things.

Recently, Emily in Paris,

before that, Younger, before that, Sex in the City.

This is sort of the more Sex in the City type scene

of the show, where you're seeing three friends together,

kind of having lovely conversation about stuff.

Company has a table

at the Central Park Conservancy Dinner tomorrow night.

Tyler is gonna be there.

I'm afraid I might stick a steak knife in his neck.

That's a nice butch fantasy.

But what you should do

is just play it cool until it fizzles out.

Really?

You really don't think it's over?

So looking at my career,

I'm playing lots of weird versions of myself,

and there's other stuff that you haven't seen.

There was A Series of Unfortunate Events,

where I played Count Olaf

with lots of prosthetic makeup.

There was Hedwig and the Angry Inch,

where I'm a transgender punk rock singer

from East Berlin.

So I'd done a lot of transformational acting,

but it was only recently with this

that I thought it would be fun

to play a version of myself

that was a little closer to home.

I'm in an 18-year relationship;

Michael was in a 17-year relationship.

I never imagined breaking up

or getting broken up with,

'cause we've been together so long.

But I had to actually play out this version of life

and that's a crappy feeling.

So I felt very naked and exposed.

Also, I have a lot of sex scenes with hot dudes

in the show.

So I was naked and exposed

in more than one way.

The point is

it was a fling.

He got it out of the system

and now they're back together.

Thanks. That does give me some hope.

Okay. This is starting to sound like a cautionary tale.

Please, do not have a baby with Colin.

We'll have nobody left to go to dinner with.

Exactly.

And we are too old to find a new friend.

Sometimes it's harder

when you're playing someone

so similar to yourself.

Sometimes it's harder to know

if you're being super specific to the character

or if you're really just playing

what you would feel as a person.

So sometimes I would question

whether I was acting

like how Neil would be in this situation

because it's so similar

or whether I was acting the way Michael would be

in a similar situation.

So in a way,

playing someone similar to myself

was more challenging.

But I also would say that playing comedy

is more challenging than playing drama.

Drama is simpler in some ways,

and people can add their own interpretation to things.

Comedy's tricky.

You wanna make people laugh,

but you wanna want them to laugh

as opposed to tell them to laugh.

So I find that the most challenging of all.

[high-pitched rewinding]

That's it. Thanks for watching.

[crew laughs]

The first one.