What Would Neil Patrick Harris Do?

I'm very well aware that I got the title of this article from the poster of the movie “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanama Bay”, but I felt that it makes so much sense. As a child, I remember having developed a mild but nevertheless persistent crush on Neil Patrick Harris as he played the lead role in Doogie Howser, M.D. (for those of you who don't know, the show was about a young genius who graduated from medical school when he was a teenager; he has to deal with growing up ON TOP OF having a residency and a medical license). I also distinctly remember being called a nerdy freak by one of my classmates when I admitted that I liked Neil Patrick Harris and thought he was cute. I took it as a compliment, especially since that mean little girl was failing her subjects spectacularly and I felt that there was nothing wrong with being a nerd OR a freak. Doogie Howser was a nerdy freak, but he gets to have cute girls and hot women after him – he was a bit of an inspiration. I was heartbroken when the show ended.

Then Neil Patrick Harris disappeared from the radar of mainstream entertainment – of course, he did one or two things here and there, but none of them were at the kind of scale that Doogie Howser M.D. generated. The next time I saw him, I was already in high school and he was playing the empathic Colonel Carl Jenkins in Starship Troopers. I practically swooned in geeky delight because at that point, I was taking great pride in knowing obscure little factoids about actors and actresses (like where they starred in before). The fact that I was a fan of Neil Patrick Harris before and that Starship Troopers became a cult classic in its own right just turned me into a giddy mess. And just like that, I began to scour for more information on the guy who used to be a teenage doctor.

Eventually, it stopped being about knowing which shows or movies or even stage plays he appeared in. By the time I hit college, it was all about appreciating him as an actor. I was fascinated at the kind of range Neil Patrick Harris displayed in his performances. In Doogie Howser, he was young and uncertain but at the same time also trying to sound as if he knows everything just so he would be taken seriously in his job. In Starship Troopers, he was a strange but serene character with powers he is determined to put to good use. In Stark Raving Mad, he played the uptight and squeamish book editor to Tony Shalhoub's eccentric and sometimes disgustingly sadistic author. In the Sweeney Todd Concert (out on DVD, check it out – Neil Patrick Harris is a fantastic singer), he was a poor, sweet, vulnerable boy who keeps getting mixed up with the wrong sort of people and who is driven to insanity after becoming emotionally attached to Mrs. Lovett. In Undercover Brother, he inspired laughs as the long-suffering “token white character”. But perhaps what had pulled him back into the mainstream consciousness would be his performance as “himself” in the first Harold and Kumar film, where he is horny, stoned celebrity that the main characters meet and pick up on their quest for White Castle burgers. Now, I revel in his performance as the incorrigible and out of this world playboy Barney in How I Met Your Mother.

My point, I suppose, is that Neil Patrick Harris has done so well in portraying characters – comedic or otherwise – that are so varied, so unique and different, that you have to appreciate the amount of talent and dedication that he pours into each and every character. Because his looks are so unique, of course, we would always know that it's Neil Patrick Harris we are watching. But we also end up believing that he IS the character that he is playing. He's not afraid at all to go three hundred and sixty degrees for any project he has.

What would Neil Patrick Harris do? Anything. What a great way to approach a career.

Elea Almazora, contributor to Actors.Com.Mx

Elea Almazora currently works as a contributor to many information-based websites, writing about many subjects ranging from culture to sciences.

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