Neil Patrick Harris is everywhere right now. Earlier this year, he attended the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin to promote his film ‘Sunny Dancer,’ stepping onto the red carpet alongside co-stars Bella Ramsey and Este Haim. In May, he and his husband David Burtka were honoured at the Family Equality Gala with the Luminary Award in recognition of their visibility, advocacy, and enduring commitment to LGBTQIA+ families, with longtime friends Elton John and David Furnish presenting the award. And just last week, at the Tony Awards on June 7, he and Burtka confirmed to E! News what their fifteen-year-old twins Gideon and Harper had already approved, that they are, in fact, the cool dads. Through all of it, Harris has carried the same quality he first articulated in a magazine interview nearly two decades ago. The ability to be fully present in whichever chapter he is currently living. The quote of the day reads, “I’ve got a lot of little plates that I’m trying to keep spinning at the same time. As I learned from chapters past, it’s important to try and stay in the chapter that you’re in, and enjoy it while it’s lasting. Not be constantly worrying about where this step will take you, living in the potential future. Like a good meal. Like a good chef’s tasting meal. You don’t want to wonder what’s next while you’re eating the foie gras.“
Meaning of the quote of the day by Neil Patrick Harris
Neil Patrick Harris said this during a September 2008 interview with The A.V. Club, at a point in his career when he was juggling multiple projects simultaneously, starring as Barney Stinson on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ while pursuing theatre, producing, and various other creative endeavours alongside it. The metaphor he reaches for, the chef’s tasting menu, is a precise and unusually vivid one for a career conversation. And it says something interesting about where his head was at the time.The tasting menu image works because it captures something specific about how anxiety about the future ruins the present. If you are sitting in a restaurant eating an extraordinary dish and spending the entire time wondering what comes next, you are not actually eating the dish. You are managing your own anticipation. The experience is happening around you rather than to you. And Harris is applying that same logic to creative work, and really to life in general. If you are always living in the potential future, always calculating the next move, always asking where this step leads, you are never fully inside the step you are currently taking.
The phrase “chapters past” is also worth sitting with. Harris is not presenting this as a theory. He is presenting it as something he learned the hard way, from previous periods of his own life where he did not stay in the chapter he was in, and paid the price for it. That experiential grounding gives the advice a weight it would not have if it were simply philosophical musing. He is speaking from somewhere real.For an actor whose career has spanned child stardom, reinvention, coming out publicly in 2006, Broadway, television, hosting, producing, and now film on the international festival circuit, the ability to be present in each chapter rather than anxious about the next one is not just good advice. It is, in many ways, the reason the chapters keep coming.
Neil Patrick Harris: a life lived chapter by chapter
Neil Patrick Harris was born on June 15, 1973, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to IMDb, and began his acting career as a child, most notably in the title role of the television series ‘Doogie Howser, M.D.,’ in which he played a teenage medical prodigy. The show ran from 1989 to 1993 and made him one of the most recognizable young actors in America.What followed was exactly the kind of multi-chapter career the 2008 quote describes. He transitioned from child star to adult performer with a determination that the industry did not always make easy, building his credibility in theatre and stage work before landing the role that reintroduced him to a generation of television audiences. As Barney Stinson on ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ which ran from 2005 to 2014, he became one of the most beloved comedic presences on American television, earning four consecutive Emmy nominations for the role, according to IMDb.
In 2006, he publicly came out as homosexual, and in 2011 he married chef and actor David Burtka; they have fifteen-year-old twins, Gideon and Harper. The family has become one of the most openly celebrated and warmly regarded in the entertainment industry, regularly appearing together at public events and speaking candidly about what it means to build a visible, happy LGBTQ+ family in Hollywood.
In 2026, he opened on Broadway in ‘Schmigadoon!’ at the Nederlander Theatre, adding yet another chapter to a stage career that has always run alongside his screen work. His film ‘Sunny Dancer,’ which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, marks his most prominent international film presence in years, placing him alongside Bella Ramsey in a project that generated significant attention on the festival circuit.The man who said in 2008 that he was trying to keep a lot of little plates spinning has, in the years since, kept them all in the air. And if the quote teaches anything, it is that the secret to doing that is not speed or calculation or relentless forward planning. It is simply the willingness to be fully inside whichever plate you are spinning right now, and trust that the others will hold until you get to them.