‘You can’t stop kids having dark thoughts’

In his 43 years, Neil Patrick Harris has known many kinds of fame. As the gawky star of Doogie Howser, MD, the Nineties television show in which he played the 16-yearold resident surgeon of an LA hospital, he was a heart-throb for the preteen crowd. Later, during the 10-year run of How I Met Your Mother, he won the admiration of frat boys for his depiction of womanising one-linermerchant Barney Stinson, while at the same time becoming the poster boy for gay acceptance in Hollywood (he came out in 2006).

On this side of the Atlantic he’s less known than he is in the United States, where he has appeared regularly on Broadway and hosted countless televised awards ceremonies, from the depths of the Spike Video Game Awards to the heights of the Tonys, Emmys and Oscars (of which more later).

There are few actors who can nail a punchline or hit a mark as effortlessly as he can. As a child, he was fascinated by magic and stagecraft, and the internal intricacies of his work seem to excite him more than the perks it affords. “I’ve always been a big fan of the Bryan Cranstons and the Alan Rickmans, who got to play juicy, interesting parts with amazing people and fantastic directors, but were able to still exist in the real world,” he says, over tea in a London hotel. You expect former child stars to have a weird, ageless, Benjamin Button vibe, but Harris is sharply dressed, affable and funny, and talks about his life with an air of shrugging self-deprecation.

“When you get to a DiCaprio level, when you become a Kidman, then your world is so different, because you’re a big movie star person, and everywhere you go you’re treated as such,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the circus performer who stands on stage, does a death-defying act and gets a standing ovation – then takes off the make-up and walks out of the tent and gets to exist like a normal, everyday person.”

It’s perhaps worth noting at this point that Harris does occasionally holiday with Elton John and David Furnish in the south of France, in a villa which, he writes in his memoir, “one can only assume Elton timeshares with God.” His own crisp appearance can probably be accounted for by the 10-year run and subsequent syndication of How I Met Your Mother, for which he is thought to have earned more than $200,000 an episode.

There is a special, indelible sort of fame that comes from playing the villain of a children’s story, be it child catcher, puppy killer or witch. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, Netflix’s adaptation of the bestselling books by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of American writer Daniel Handler), Harris takes the part of the murderous Count Olaf, set on seizing the inheritance of three orphaned children.

Harris’s own six-year-olds – a twin boy and girl – are too young to have read the books, but he imagines that any child would appreciate their atmosphere of desperate menace. “Stories that are macabre, stories that are tragic and graphic, are kind of the way kids think,” he says. “Our son goes around pretending anything he can find is a gun, and when we say that’s not OK, he just switches to an invisible gun. You can’t stop a kid from thinking: ‘I will cut you, I will blow you up.’ ”

Harris’s transformation into Olaf involved three hours in the makeup chair every morning; because Olaf is himself a master of disguise, this might on any given day include the addition of a prosthetic nose, a shock-headed wig, a bald cap, a long grey beard or fake breasts. The production values are high, with the whole series being directed by Barry Sonnenfeld,

Former child star Neil Patrick Harris tells Horatia Harrod why he’s helping bring Lemony Snicket’s weird world to TV