In ‘Uncoupled,’ Neil Patrick Harris Plays the Game
Neil Patrick Harris loves puzzles. He loves games. He has designed a single-player board game, Box One; he plays Wordle daily and consistently scores a 3.
An accomplished magician, he delights in magic tricks. Every issue of his newsletter, Wondercade, comes with a riddle of one kind or another.
His personality is fizz and bounce, with just a touch of guile. He tends to look like he is up to something. Something fun. His house in the Hamptons, which I visited on a recent, stupidly perfect Sunday — had he somehow gamed the weather? — is larded with jokes, fake-outs and pranks, which begin at the doormat and never really stop. (There is, I am reliably informed, an indoor slide.) The screened porch where we chatted was ornamented with an enormous Jenga set.
Other games lingered on a trolley nearby. But the game that Harris, 49, plays like no other is the game of his own career. A child star, as the prime-time prodigy Doogie Howser, M.D., he managed the transition to adult work with relative grace.
