Neil Patrick Harris is everywhere now. Earlier this year, he attended the Berlin International Film Festival in Berlin to promote his film “Sunny Dancer,” where he hit the red carpet alongside co-stars Bella Ramsay and Estee Haim.
In May, he and his husband, David Burtka, were honored 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 Jaedon and Harper have already agreed to is that they are actually great parents.
And through it all, Harris carried the same quality he first expressed in a magazine interview nearly two decades ago. The ability to be fully present in whatever season he or she is currently in. Today’s quote reads, “I have a lot of small plates that I try to keep rotating at the same time. As you’ve learned from past chapters, it’s important to try to stay in the chapter you’re in, and enjoy it while it lasts.
Don’t constantly worry about where this step will take you, you are 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 eating foie gras.“
Meaning of today’s quote from Neil Patrick Harris
Neil Patrick Harris said this during a September 2008 interview with The AV Club, at a point in his career when he was doing multiple projects at once, starring as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother while pursuing theater, producing, and many other creative endeavors alongside.
The metaphor he comes up with, the chef’s tasting menu, is an extraordinarily precise and vivid metaphor for a professional 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 destroys the present. If you’re sitting in a restaurant eating an unusual dish and spend the whole time wondering what’s coming next, you’re not actually eating the dish.
You manage your own expectations. The experience happens around you, not to you. Harris applies the same logic to creative work, and to life in general.
If you are always living in the possible future, always calculating the next step, always wondering where that step will lead you, you will never be fully within the step you are currently taking.
phrase “Past chapters” It’s worth sitting down with too. Harris does not present this as a theory.
He presents it as something he learned the hard way, from earlier periods of his life where he didn’t stay in the class he was in, and he paid the price for it. This empirical basis gives the advice a weight that it would not have had if it were merely philosophical musings. He speaks from a real place.For an actor whose career has spanned child stardom, reinvention, public appearances in 2006, Broadway, television, hosting, producing, and now filming on the international festival circuit, being able to be present in each chapter rather than worrying about the next isn’t just good advice.
It is, in many ways, the reason the seasons 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 lead role of the TV series “Doogie Howser, MD,” in which he played a teenage medical prodigy. The show ran from 1989 to 1993, making him one of the most popular young actors in America.What followed was exactly the kind of multi-season career described by the 2008 quote.
He went from child star to adult entertainer with a determination that the industry wasn’t always easy, building his credibility in theater and stage work before landing the role that reintroduced him to a generation of television viewers. As Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother, which ran from 2005 to 2014, he became one of the most beloved comedians on American television, earning four consecutive Emmy nominations for the role, according to IMDb.
In 2006, he publicly announced that he was gay, 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 famous and respected families 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 a play on Broadway called Schmigadoon! at the Nederlander Theatre, adding another chapter to his theatrical career that has always gone hand in hand with his screen work.
His film “Sunny Dancer,” which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, marks his most prominent international cinematic presence in years, placing him alongside Bella Ramsay in a project that has generated significant interest on the festival circuit.The man who said in 2008 that he was trying to keep a lot of small plates spinning has kept them all up in the air in the years since. And if the quote teaches us anything, it’s that the secret to doing this isn’t speed, calculation, or relentless forward planning. It is simply the desire to be fully present within whatever plate you spin now, and trusting that others will hold on until you reach them.
