Neil Patrick Harris: “I always find it kind of douchey when an actor is ready to get off of a nice role in a popular show”

How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris is perfectly happy where he is. That includes staying on the hit CBS show.

“I always find it kind of douchey when an actor is ready to get off of a nice role in a popular show, so I would never go anywhere near the I’m ready to be done with it’ sentiment. And frankly, I think (Harris’ character) Barney is just one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” Harris said when asked whether he was content on sticking with Mother or if he was ready for a new challenge.

The former Doogie Howser child star also touched on how he feels out potential projects. “I meet with the people that are involved creatively to see what kinds of people they are, and I’m a decent judge of that. I’ve done all right like when I met (writers Hayden Schlossberg and Jon Hurwitz) for the Harold and Kumar movies; I wasn’t sure what their agenda was, but they seemed pretty pure in what they wanted to have happen and they followed through. So you have to trust a little blindly sometimes, but that’s kind of the business that we’re in.”

That kind of blind trust led him to and came in handy while filming The Smurfs, a CGI-assisted film that arrived in theaters last Friday. Talking about acting alongside the tiny, computer-animated blue creatures, the 38-year-old explained, “It was asking a lot of questions about what the visuals were going to be that I can’t see, so I had a clear idea in my mind what I was reacting to, and then just putting trust in them. I wanted to be as specific as possible; I didn’t want it to be generic-y acting. So the more I knew exactly how they moved, what they looked like, what their voices sounded like, I could imagine with more clarity.”

via WSJ