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Neil Patrick Harris shares his thoughts on “The Smurfs” – Metro US

Neil Patrick Harris shares his thoughts on “The Smurfs”

Aside from getting the chance to help update a beloved franchise, there was one main draw about starring in “The Smurfs” for Neil Patrick Harris: It was nothing like his over-the-top “How I Met Your Mother” character. “I spend six and a half [or] seven months a year playing the chewing-on-the-scenery Barney Stinson, and so I look for a role that is different than him in some way during my off-time,” he says. And his character, Patrick Winslow, a father-to-be and put-upon marketing exec whose New York apartment becomes a hideout for refugee Smurfs, is indeed nothing like Barney.

The character is also apparently a departure from Harris himself, who admits he wouldn’t be as welcoming as his onscreen persona if a gaggle of little blue people were to invade his home. “I’d probably tase them and keep them in a small box and quickly find a reality show or some way to make a profit from it, travel around like the Warner Bros. cartoon with the frog,” he says before stopping to consider the severity of his answer. “I’m Gargamel, apparently.”

The notoriously sunny actor strays to the darker side of humor again when pressed on what his Smurf name would be. “I’d be Snuff Smurf, and I’d end the suffering of all the dying Smurfs everywhere,” he says, grinning, before thinking better of himself. “That was a dark answer,” he says. “Let’s say Magical Smurf because I like magic.”

Just because Harris has now starred alongside the legendary Smurfs doesn’t mean all his questions have been answered, though. “Who’s shagging Smurfette, really? I want to know what’s going on late at night in Smurf Village,” he says. “Does she get passed from Smurf to Smurf? Is she a one-Smurf girl? Is Papa involved? That doesn’t seem right at all. She could swing the other way. You never know.”