After it was announced that Neil Patrick Harris would once again be Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Father, he and star Hilary Duff opened up about the process with Entertainment Weekly. What it was like having him on the show and how it came about. According to Harris, it was due to the efforts of How I Met Your Mother director Pam Fryman.
“In true Pam Fryman form, she just carries on with a great postured confidence and helms the ship so well, and so given all of the strangeness of the circumstances, it just still felt like we were making good content,” said Harris.
Barney wouldn’t be the first HIMYM alumni to appear on the show. Last year, Cobie Smulders reprised her role as Robin Scherbatsky, aka Robin Sparkles, during the season one finale. Upon finding that out, Harris’ first thought was, “Oh boy. Well, now this is inevitable. They’re going to ask all of us.” His second thought was, “Well, I don’t want to be the lone holdout, so I’ll go second.”
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“I think this is all very strategic Pam Fryman: ‘I’m going to go to Cobie first, then Neil can’t say no,'” Duff said.
However, Harris didn’t want to return as HIMYM’s breakout character simply for nostalgia. He talked with Fryman and “the gang” about coming back and they pitched him an idea of how they would do it. Harris also added that there were “slight reservations” about how the character would return and how he would have changed, if at all, since the last time we saw him.
“In what direction do you want him to have aged? Is he worse, is he better, is he different, is he the same? What they had come up with was a smart call. And I was also excited to work with Hilary, so all of that seemed like it was a fait accompli in its own way,” said Harris.
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According to Duff, she and Harris were in the hair and makeup room the first time they ran lines together. “It was just like he slipped into Barney, and I got a little flustered and I forgot all my lines.” Ironically, by the time they finally arrived on set, Harris was the one who was constantly forgetting his lines.
“I broke 100 times. He had so much to do that day, he had pages and pages of dialogue, and everything that could go wrong went wrong. Some crew guy got hurt and there was an ambulance, it was pouring down rain, of course on the only night that we had him, and we’re outside, and we’d already shot stuff leading up to this night where it wasn’t raining. Thankfully it didn’t even look like it was raining, but my makeup artist would come in and she’s like, ‘You’re covered in rain, your face is so wet. I don’t know how we can’t tell on camera.’ It was so funny. But he’s just the best sport, and it was a dream to have him on,” said Duff.
Fryman was one of many members of the crew to have worked on both shows. Harris said, “10 members of the How I Met Your Father crew, including the first assistant director, worked on How I Met Your Mother in similar job capacities.” Something that made him feel all sorts of emotions while being on set.
“So I’m there playing a character that I haven’t played for some time surrounded by the same voices and the same visages that I had worked with for almost a decade, almost a decade ago. All of it felt surreal, and exciting, and also business as usual. I loved to be a part of it,” said Harris.
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