Hilary Duff has said that “everything that could go wrong went wrong” during Neil Patrick Harris’s cameo on How I Met Your Father.
Harris will return as Barney Stinson – the character he starred as during the nine-season run of How I Met Your Mother – on Tuesday (28 March) night’s episode of the spin-off series.
Discussing Harris’s cameo, series star Duff spoke to Entertainment Weekly about working with the HIMYM alum.
“He had so much to do that day, he had pages and pages of dialogue, and everything that could go wrong went wrong,” Duff recalled.
Listing some incidents that occurred, Duff explained: “Some crew guy got hurt and there was an ambulance, it was pouring down rain, of course on the only night that we had him, and we’re outside, and we’d already shot stuff leading up to this night where it wasn’t raining.
“Thankfully it didn’t even look like it was raining, but my makeup artist would come in and she’s like, ‘You’re covered in rain, your face is so wet. I don’t know how we can’t tell on camera,’” she admitted.
Duff said that the experience was “so funny” and that she “broke [laughing] 100 times”.
“But he’s just the best sport, and it was a dream to have him on,” she added.
Harris told the outlet that he credits How I Met Your Father director Pam Fryman with “helming the ship so well”.
“She just carries on with a great postured confidence,” he said. “So given all of the strangeness of the circumstances, it just still felt like we were making good content.”
Harris isn’t the only original HIMYM cast member to make a guest appearance on Hulu’s spinoff. The actor said he was inspired to return after his former co-star Cobie Smulder’s brief reprisal of the part of Robin Scherbatsky in the first season.
“I knew that Cobie got to play Robin in season one of the show,” Harris said. “And I thought, ‘Oh boy. Well, now this is inevitable. They’re going to ask all of us.’ Once Cobie does something, how can you say no?
“So I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to be the lone holdout, so I’ll go second.’”
How I Met Your Father’s season two midseason finale premieres on Hulu on Tuesday 28 March.
