Neil Patrick Harris’ character navigates the highs and lows, tops and bottoms of the gay dating scene when his long-term relationship implodes in Netflix’s Uncoupled.
In Uncoupled, Neil plays Michael, a gay man in his late 40s whose life is thrown into disarray when his boyfriend Colin (Tuc Watkins) walks out on him after 17 years together. Michael suddenly finds himself navigating single gay life for the first time in almost two decades.
In real life, Neil Patrick Harris is happily married to David Burtka – they’ve been together almost as long as Michael and Colin in Uncoupled. He was able to put himself in Michael’s shoes by imagining what it would be like to find himself in that situation.
“The emotion of it was the gig because you had to play the realistic gut wrench of a rug being pulled out from underneath you,” he tells PinkNews.
“I didn’t appreciate at the time how easy that emotion was to find within myself because I’ve been in a long-term, similar relationship, and even though we’re not breaking up – that would be awful – it was easy to do these scenes as if that had happened. Like, I’ve thought it out – ‘Wow, what would that be like?’ But I’ve never played it out. So to have actually played it out for more than a couple months was cathartic in its own way.”
