Neil Patrick Harris has played a doctor, a magician, a legendary womanizer, and Doogie Howser, but apparently his most convincing role growing up was “totally normal straight wrestling fan.”
Sitting down with Sam Roberts on SiriusXM’s The Sam Roberts Show, Harris got talking about pro wrestling and admitted he was into it a lot more than he let on as a kid, and that looking back, it basically doubled as an early personality quiz.
“I secretly liked the WWE when I was younger, because it was kind of a tell for knowing I was gonna be gay,” Harris said. He continued, “It was just, like, tight shorts; they’re oiled up. Grappling. So it’s like, I’m not supposed to be liking this as much as I am.”
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A Pretty Relatable Origin Story
It’s a joke, but it’s also not really a new one in wrestling circles. Fans have poked fun at WWE’s oiled-up, barely-there-wardrobe aesthetic for decades, and Harris is just one of the few famous people willing to say the quiet part out loud on the record. He’s been publicly out since 2006, married to actor and chef David Burtka since 2014, and has built a career, from How I Met Your Mother to Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway to hosting the Oscars and the Tonys, on being one of the more visible, well-liked queer entertainers working today.
Roberts and Harris got there while talking about his new movie, Sunny Dancer, a coming-of-age comedy that hit theaters on September 18. The cast also includes Bella Ramsey and James Norton, and the film follows a teenage cancer survivor navigating friendships at a summer camp built for kids going through the same thing.
WWE Keeps Landing in Unexpected Places
It’s the kind of quote that’s a little funny, a little sweet, and a good reminder that WWE fandom cuts across every kind of person, including future Tony winners doing press for indie dramas. Harris didn’t name a favorite wrestler or era, but the “tight shorts, oiled up, grappling” description tracks with pretty much any Saturday morning of WWE programming from the ’80s or ’90s, prime Harris childhood territory.
Wrestling has spent the last few years actively courting exactly this kind of crossover attention, and it keeps paying off in the form of famous people casually admitting, decades later, that they were watching the whole time.
