As the hooknosed, hygiene-challenged, villainous Count Olaf in “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” Neil Patrick Harris could easily be the stuff of nightmares – yours and your children’s.
“Unfortunate Events,” in which he wickedly places the Baudelaire orphans – Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Sunny (Presley Smith) – in harm’s way while chasing after their inheritance, isn’t typical family fare.
But the malice and nefariousness are surprisingly enjoyable. “We’re far from friendly, but I like that a 10-year-old and a 40-year-old can watch the same scene and enjoy it for different reasons,” he said. “We feel like we’re making something that, in all of its nastiness, in all of its cynicism, is good.”
Hewing closely to Daniel Handler’s marvelously macabre Lemony Snicket novels, the Netflix series, now in Season 2, will end after Season 3, with the last of the 13 books. Which will give Harris, 44 – a multiple Emmy nominee as the womanizing Barney in CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother” and a Tony winner as the transgender East German rocker in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” – more time to spend with his husband, David Burtka, and their 7-year-olds, Gideon (his thing is chess) and Harper (hers is belting out songbook standards), who live in New York while he shoots in Vancouver.
And yes, the twins are allowed to watch their father at work. “Of course, it’s probably not the perfect content because it’s pretty dark – a lot of slapping children and smoking cigarettes and trying to murder 14-year-olds,” he said with a vaguely maniacal chuckle after pouring himself a glass of Scotch at a New York photo studio. “I don’t know that that’s a conversation to have at the dinner table, but for us it’s a little bit different.”