Neil Patrick Harris looks younger than his 40 years (he reached the 4-0 milestone in June), yet he has already lived publicly through a lifetime’s worth of artistic phases: the teen-actor phase, in which he was, from 1989 to 1993, the star of Doogie Howser, M.D.; the transitional theater-actor phase, in which he flourished in revivals or touring productions of Rent, Cabaret, and Assassins; the proper-TV-star phase, in which he took on the role of the caddish Barney Stinson on CBS’s How I Met Your Mother, now beginning its ninth and final season; and his M.C.-of-his-generation phase, which has seen him preside over the Emmys twice (as of this month) and the Tonys four times. Soon begins a new phase, in which Harris shall trade in Barney’s cherished slim-fit suits for the hot-pants drag of the title character in John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, coming to Broadway next spring. But what of the common denominator through all these phases: the real Neil? Herewith—wait for it!—the real deal.
__HE QUELLS__pre-show butterflies by first doing a series of deep-breathing exercises to calm himself down and then drinking a can of Red Bull to rev himself up.
HIS LONGTIME partner, David Burtka, is both an actor and a trained chef who staged under Mario Batali at New York’s Babbo. A Bolognese enthusiast, Harris avers that Burtka’s “Northern Italian is off the charts.”
HE STARTED to maintain a Twitter feed, called @NPHFoodPorn, dedicated exclusively to the sumptuous meals he eats in restaurants, because some followers of his regular Twitter feed were annoyed by his frequent food-related posts. He notes that a certain amount of controversy surrounds the photo that he uses as his @NPHFoodPorn avatar, depicting “what I could look like if I only ate massive amounts of multi-course meals” and generated by an app called FatBooth.
NOTWITHSTANDING THE impressively agile specimen he is, bounding through a hoop at the 2013 Tonys, his knees are “remarkably crackly going up and down stairs”—a souvenir, he believes, of the physically grueling ’97–’98 touring production of Rent.
HE RETAINS his signature mussed-forward hairstyle with an oversize, ChapStick-like grooming product from Indonesia called a Tancho Tique.
HE SHARES with Johnny Carson, Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Dick Van Dyke, and Dick Cavett a lifelong enthusiasm for magic. Among his favorite routines of all time is Martin’s “The Great Flydini” bit, wherein the comedian silently pulled an impressive succession of objects—eggs, a lit cigarette, a ringing telephone, a Luciano Pavarotti puppet—out of the fly of his pants.
HIS AND Burtka’s go-to music at their home, which they share with their pre-school-age twins, Gideon and Harper, comes via the digital station Reedy Creek Radio, which is devoted to playing music from Disney theme parks—“like the queue-line music to Haunted Mansion, or the original theme song from [the discontinued EPCOT ride] Horizons,” he says.
HE LAMENTS but accepts the marginalization of one of his favorite Muppets, Crazy Harry, the wild-eyed explosives nut. “I think they’ve put him in the back, now that the world has changed,” he says. “Probably realized that the Let’s-set-off-bombs Muppet was possibly not good for children.”
HE IS a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico. In moments of stress, he “reverts in a culinary way” to his home state, turning to chips, salsa, enchiladas, and margaritas.
HE UN-IRONICALLY maintains a shrine of “calming keepsakes” in a “meditation corner” of his house. Among the assembled artifacts: rocks collected on family trips to Knott’s Berry Farm, fortunes from fortune cookies, a bottle cap from the Magic Hat Brewing Company, and a golden-Buddha statuette, against which lean the four wisdom teeth he had pulled from his mouth in his teens.
HE BELIEVES that, had he been a star in the 1950s and compelled by the mores of the time to enter into a sham marriage for publicity purposes, he would have taken as his bride either Doris Day or Cyd Charisse—“sort of the feminine-masculine,” he explains.
HE DOESN’T want How I Met Your Mother fans to be alarmed by his pending weight loss, whose cause will not be illness but rigorous preparation for the Hedwig part. “As Barney I’m all shoulders and arms and chest, but as Hedwig I’ll be all legs and butt and back,” he says. “Like Cyd Charisse.”
