Neil Patrick Harris on Gone Girl: ‘I was pinching myself’

One night this spring, Neil Patrick Harris was wearing high heels, denim hotpants and glittery lip-gloss, talking about the injustices of being a rock’n’roll gender outlaw. As he drew breath, a voice shouted out: “I love you, Neil!” Harris spat back: “Who the fuck is Neil?”

Harris was on stage, starring in the first Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a cabaret-style musical with a porous fourth wall. At that moment, Harris was Hedwig, and Hedwig likes the spotlight to herself.

Still, the question lingers: who is Neil Patrick Harris? For someone with 10 million Twitter followers, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, five Emmys and a Tony, his appeal is weirdly diffuse. “I’ve been very fortunate to have lived a myriad of chapters in the last decade,” he says down the line from his home in New York, a domestic clatter of kids and dogs in the background. “What was once a concern of mine – to make sure I that wasn’t doing one singular thing my whole life and only known for being just one little archetype – has gone away.”

And how. Harris was for years, and to some always will be, Doogie Howser, MD, his breakthrough sitcom role as a child-prodigy physician. To others, he’s Barney Stinson, horndog best bud in a more recent hit sitcom, How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), which came to an end in March after more than 200 episodes. Musical theatre fans were smitten long before his Hedwig became the toast of Broadway. To observers of LGBT culture, he’s the guy who proved an out gay actor can be a beloved mainstream star. And now he has got a key role in a movie that has “sure thing” written all over it.

“I was pinching myself at the opportunity,” Harris says, recalling an invitation to discuss the film, Gone Girl, over lunch with director David Fincher. Based on the sensationally successful novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, Gone Girl is about Nick (Ben Affleck), a writer suspected of murder following the disappearance of his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike). Harris plays Amy’s ex, Desi Collings and he pretty much steals the show. Desi provides light relief (his hopeful anticipation of “Octopus and Scrabble” gets the biggest laughs) as well as ambivalent creepiness. The latter is a mode Harris nailed in early post-Doogie roles, notably as a budding SS-officer-type in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The most abiding image of him in the film, however, is likely to be from a – very diligently rehearsed – bedroom tumble with Pike.

“We had to rehearse the sex scene with David, like every inch of it – ‘Then you put your mouth on his dick here, and then this number of thrusts, and then you ejaculate,’” Harris told one reporter. “He doesn’t want a lot of re-interpretation once you start rolling,” he clarifies of Fincher’s approach, which is designed to ensure different takes can be cut together easily while editing. “I don’t want to say that it was robotic because it makes it sound like the intention was to not be sexy or physically charged,” Harris says of the scene. Still, “it was a strange couple of days …”

Such precise preparation contrasted with Harris’s work on HIMYM. As Barney the player, he says: “my job was to chew around the scenery, to find where I can add some of my own randomness to what was already an over-the-top guy”. But it’s the kind of gear he thrives on. “What I have been very appreciative of in my recent career is that the parts certainly aren’t the same performance over and over. To go from a Barney Stinson to a Hedwig Schmidt to a Desi Collings – those are three totally different people, which requires a whole different way of behaving and standing and talking from me.”

Born in 1973, Harris grew up in New Mexico as a theatre geek with soft spots for circus, magic and musicals. He was a Golden Globe nominee at 15 (for the Whoopi Goldberg film Clara’s Heart) and, thanks to Doogie Howser, a star at 16. The definition of high-concept, the show combined life-and-death dramatics with teen angst, laffs and schmaltz, anchored in Harris’s unthreatening, feet-on-the-ground charm. After ratings started to slide, however, the show was axed in 1993.

Harris could have peaked there: he kept working, including roles in musicals, but not very prominently. Then he played himself as an outrageous sleazeball in 2004’s Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, dispelling any lingering goody-two-shoes vibes with lines such as “Come on, dudes, let’s pick up some trim at a strip club” – and indeed lines of a different kind. “I never thought that snorting coke off the ass of a stripper would reinvent my career so well,” Harris later acknowledged. The self-mocking turn surely helped him land the role that returned him to primetime in 2005, as HIMYM’s Barney, an indefatigable pick-up artist and goofball with a sensitive side (and a yen for magic tricks). The show’s romantic focus won it a devoted fan base – and a more leisurely sign-off than Harris’s other sitcom.

“Weirdly, Doogie ended kind of abruptly,” he recalls. “I think there was the intention to do a fifth season but [the network] said they were going to have to slash budgets and it just never ended up happening. The last episode did not end with a series conclusion or wrapping of anything up; it just sort of ended, I think, with Doogie on a plane going to Mexico! It was very unceremonious. So it was nice that How I Met Your Mother got the opposite treatment: they gave us an entire season to wrap things up. It was a lovely way to end that show.”

By the time HIMYM debuted, Harris’s sexuality was the subject of speculation. He had played several gay characters and made no secret among friends and colleagues of his relationship with actor David Burtka, whom he met in 2004. He came out publicly in 2006, during HIMYM’s second season, to gratifying indifference: Harris-as-Barney confirmed that mainstream US audiences could accept a gay actor in a straight role. Harris has become probably America’s most successful out gay actor ever, serving alongside Burtka, whom he married last month, and their twins Harper and Gideon, as a poster-boy for same-sex family life, while making enough gags about threesomes, booze and porn to retain a bit of bite.

In his first major interview about his sexuality, with Out magazine in 2008, Harris declared that “I’m striving to be an example of normalcy”, earning the ire of LGBT activists who didn’t think “normal” was that great, thanks. Harris regretted causing offence, then put his money where his mouth was when he selected his first post-primetime gig. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, created by writer-performer John Cameron Mitchell and composer Stephen Trask in 1998, is the bittersweet story of an East German singer who seeks rock stardom in the US after botched gender reassignment surgery. A cult hit in downtown New York and then as an indie movie, it finally hit big with Harris in the title role on Broadway.

“We knew eventually Broadway would come around to it,” deadpans John Cameron Mitchell. “It was an opportunity to bring the story to a wider audience and Neil Patrick Harris was the perfect person to do that: he appeals to so many people and he was keen to go a bit grittier and he triumphed.”

As well as committing him to a rigorous diet and exercise regime, Harris admitted the part “brings up a lot of homophobic insecurities within myself”. He explains that “getting to do something as transformative – as extremely transformative – as Hedwig required me to come to terms with a lot of randomness that was deep-seated in my body, my psyche, my soul … That includes why armour is put on, why layers are taken off. It was probably the most I’ve ever grown or learned or been at peace while rehearsing, while performing and post-experience. It certainly has changed my views about things and I hope I’ll be able to instil a more inclusive set of views to my family and my kids.”

Transgressive as Hedwig’s subject matter might be, musicals are familiar terrain for Harris: he has been in several Sondheim shows, played the Emcee in Cabaret, and shown off his pipes in everything from Glee to Joss Whedon’s web series Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. And at the same time as earning leftfield cred as trans outsider Hedwig, he has notched up appearances in family-friendly franchises including The Muppets, Sesame Street and The Smurfs. He has also directed for stage – Rent at the Hollywood Bowl, a magic show in New York – and co-produced immersive theatre shows.

When it comes to career development, then, Harris has plenty of options but seems to be in no rush. He rebuffed the chance to succeed talkshow star David Letterman when he retires next year (“I just finished a long-running opportunity and I don’t want to jump into another”), and if big-screen success were the main goal, moving to New York – as Harris and his family did earlier this year – would be an odd choice.

Plus, of course, Gone Girl changes everything. Harold and Kumar’s NPH, Barney and Hedwig all appealed to a certain crowd – a youthful, ironic audience who might at least consider themselves hip. But those of us who have grown up with him will be outnumbered by the millions who will pile into the multiplex for Fincher’s latest. Amid the murk and shade of a movie everyone will see, he brings light. Who Neil Patrick Harris is may not be a mystery on the level of Gone Girl. But the movie is certain to change the answer for good.

Gone Girl is released in the US and UK on 3 October and Australia on 2 October