How do you like your Neil Patrick Harris?
Do you like him frozen in time as a precocious boy genius doctor with a ridiculous name? Do you prefer him suited up, on a legendary run of female conquests on How I Met Your Mother? Perhaps you like your Neil Patrick Harris belting in high heels on Broadway, or cannily emceeing an awards show? Maybe, too, you prefer your Neil Patrick Harris to be Gay Neil Patrick Harris, the happily married husband to David Burtka, and doting father to their adorable twins?
Neil Patrick Harris begins his new memoir Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography with a cheeky warning, that his “self-serving celebrity autobiography is different from other self-serving celebrity autobiographies.”
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Having already been approached numerous times to write about his life, Harris couldn’t wrap his head around doing so without the act seeming masturbatory, or “seeming like I actually had things to talk about,” he tells me, “because my life has been so random and diverse and playing into different demographics that I didn’t know from which voice to speak.”
The genius twist? Presenting his life as a Choose Your Own Adventure story, adopting the throwback chapter book format to allow his autobiography’s readers to navigate through his eclectic life on the path that most interests them.
“If you think that I’m the kid from the doctor show that you’ve grown up with then you can choose that adventure, that autobiography,” he says. “If you’d rather assume that I’m Barney Stinson and do coke off of strippers’ asses after stealing cars [a la Harold and Kumar], then you could read that autobiography.”
Covering the bases from gifted teen growing up in New Mexico to child actor to prodigy magician to Broadway star to sitcom staple to host extraordinaire to de facto gay icon, Choose Your Own Autobiography allows Harris to play into, as he jokes, “being a demographic whore.”
And there’s a lot of different tenets of his life, each with its own fans, for him to whore himself out to.
Theatre fans will live for his story about being chewed out by Patti LuPone when he showed up for rehearsals for his role in a staged Lincoln Center production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company unprepared. Those who do not know what any of the words in that previous sentence means will get off on his tales of clubbing underage in L.A. with Stephen Dorff during the Doogie Howser years, safely without the lens of TMZ to follow him around.
The hopeless romantic among us might simultaneously swoon and grow green with envy as he recounts the grandiose 40th birthday scavenger hunt that Burtka planned for him, while the gossips among us might want to hear about how out of her damned mind Anne Heche was she starred opposite Harris on Broadway in Proof.
In other words, it’s been a long journey from Doogie Howser to starring now in David Fincher’s take on Gone Girl. Plus, if you haven’t heard, Neil Patrick Harris is gay. He’s a very famous gay person. So there’s a lot to say about the effect that’s had on his life in a memoir.
“That’s the beauty of the structure. When something seems uncomfortable it was easy to jump to something that wasn’t,” Harris says. The beginnings of his coming to terms with being gay, for example, interrupts with a choice: to either turn to page 27 to continue exploring “your adolescent sexuality,” or to keep “those kind of issues hovering in your subconscious” by flipping to the next page, where a story about a run-in with Scott Caan awaits.
“I’m not trying to force my life down anyone’s throat,” he tells me. “But if you want to read about things being forced down throats, you can go to that page.”
(Obviously this reporter flipped to that page immediately.)
The interesting thing about Harris’s autobiography, especially when compared to other celebrities who release memoirs at a time when their careers are still successful, is that he is actually quite candid about his past—sex, partying, or otherwise.
He talks about the time he lost his virginity to a woman—a fan of Doogie Howser—at a house party in New Mexico. He talks about the first sexual encounters he had with a man, a co-star from when he was starring in Rent on Broadway. He talks about a whirlwind weekend-long affair with a man he met at a club in Berlin. He talks about meeting David, who was actually in a relationship with somebody else the first time they ran into each other on the street in New York, and he talks about the surreal day spent in a room with four members of his publicity and management team crafting the statement that would be his public coming out as gay.
There’s a clever chapter in Choose Your Own Autobiography where Harris pens a mock interview with a reporter from a men’s magazine that was based on the dozens that he’d done following his Hollywood resurgence with Harold and Kumar and How I Met Your Mother. The interview is hilarious, but because of how upsettingly accurate it is in reflecting the obtuse, borderline offensive ways he would be asked about his sexuality by reporters too ignorant to know that they sounded like idiots.
An exchange from the fictionalized—but brutally based on reality—Totally Straight Guy magazine interview goes like this:
TSG: So, let’s get right to it: are you gay?
NPH: Yes.
TSG: Really?
NPH: Yes.
TSG: Okay. [Pause.] ’Cause here’s the thing: you seem totally straight.
NPH: What do you mean?
TSG: Hey, don’t be offended. I mean it as compliment.
NPH: Don’t be offended as a gay man when you say that seeming straight is a compliment?
The rest of the mock interview hits the typical boneheaded tenets: How does he convincingly play Barney Stinson, who loves sex with women, when he actually loves sex with men? How is that he doesn’t seem gay, but actually is gay? Asinine things like that.
Harris, by the way he presents it in the book, clearly has a good sense of humor about those interactions now, noting those kinds of interviews as crucial stepping stones on the way to coming to terms with this whole exhausting can-gay-actors-play-straight thing we’ve been debating for years. But sitting in a room with a guy and tape recorder asking those questions had to have been frustrating at the time, right?
“Thankfully, those kinds of interviews have sort of stopped, because my personal life is partly public now,” he says. But even then it didn’t bother him, he says. “I’m a big fan of the fact that the alpha male, kind-of frat guy thinks that Barney Stinson is awesome. Even though they know I’m married to a guy and have kids and all of that. So that dichotomy I am grateful for.”
And while the answer to questions of the ilk asked by the fictional Totally Straight Guy reporter are head-slappingly obvious—Harris can believably play a straight character because he is an actor and that’s the very definition of acting—it really can’t be discounted how crucial a part the popularity of Harris’s performance on How I Met Your Mother has played in inching people’s thinking forward when it comes to envisioning actors in roles, regardless of their sexuality.
“I think in society we’re thankfully getting past the ‘ew’ mentality of same-sex coupling,” Harris says, riffing on the power of visibility and normalizing and, ultimately, creating comfort for those kinds of people who may have chosen to skip any gay-themed adventure in his book. “Because everyone now has seen examples of people who have shacked up. So once that is gone, it seems like it’s less difficult to imagine someone in a different role. If that ‘ew’ element is taken out of the equation, it’s just how believable can someone be as an actor.”
True to that sentiment, Harris can currently be seen on-screen playing a straight man having straight sex in David Fincher’s buzzy adaptation of Gone Girl, as the former boyfriend to Rosamund Pike’s titular "Girl."
What did Harris think of the finished project? “I was a) very excited that the sense of growing concern and paranoia and unsettledness was as pervasive as I thought I had hoped it would be and b) very excited that my scenes weren’t cut out of the movie,” he says.
Not only were his scenes not cut, but they were excellent, with Harris nailing the tricky darkly comic, slightly unhinged, vaguely creepy, tinge-of-campy tone that Fincher imbued the film with. The critical accolades Harris is receiving for his work in Gone Girl come mere months after he won the Tony Award for his stunning performance as an East German transgender rocker in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
“Because I’m so often identified with two characters with interesting names, in lieu of questions people will often shout ‘Doogie!’ or ‘Barney!,’ do the head nod, and walk away,” Harris says. But after back-to-back unexpected performances in projects as wildly different as Hedwig and Gone Girl, and with Doogie Howser and How I Met Your Mother firmly behind him, it’s kind of thrilling to see what adventure Harris will choose to go on next.
