I Can’t Watch “How I Met Your Mother” The Same Way After Learning These 35 Behind-The-Scenes Facts
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How I Met Your Mother will always be a comfort show to me (as long as I pretend the last episode doesn’t exist). In the nine years the show was in production, some pretty interesting stuff went on behind-the-scenes.
Here are 35 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about HIMYM:
1.
Series co-creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays decided to reveal Robin wasn’t the mother in the pilot episode to avoid comparisons between Ted and Robin and Ross and Rachel from Friends. At the 2006 William S. Paley TV Fest, Carter said, “We knew we didn’t want to do ‘will they or won’t they?’ We were already worried about the Friends comparisons, and thank God that’s gone away. I think that the rhythm of the show is different from that. We didn’t want to do Friends; we didn’t want to do Ross and Rachel and ‘will they or won’t they’ for ten years. We wanted to do an interesting friendship where they’re kind of in love, but for some reason, it’s just not in the stars for them.”
2.
Barney and Robin’s relationship was Neil Patrick Harris’s idea. He told Fan Carpet, “I’ve been actively trying to make that happen. I talk to the writers, and I was pitching it, and I’d try to do little things in our scenes together where I gave her an extra look and an extra glance or would stare only at her during a whole scene just to see if anyone was noticing. I thought there was a nice wrinkle about Barney liking the chick that Ted wants. Though, really, I was just hoping that I’d get to ‘F’ her once and get it out of my system, but it was a good ‘F.’ It was a capital ‘F!'”
Cobie Smulders added, “I agree with all that Neil said. I think when she was in a relationship with Ted, and it came up, and they were like, ‘You’re going to hook up with Barney,’ I was like, ‘No way. That is not cool. They’re like best friends!’ I got kind of weirded out by it. Then I just feel like, in life, these things happen. That’s one of the things that I love about our show: a lot of our writers take from their own personal experiences. At the beginning of the show, Carter Bays is Ted, and Craig Thomas is Marshall. It is based on their lives. So it’s very much filled with their own life experiences. So I went that way in my mind of like, ‘Listen, this stuff happens when you’re a close group of friends. People hook up, and it happens.’ Then, once we got together, I really enjoyed working with Neil. I enjoy our scenes so much, and I feel like it’s a very interesting and comical pairing.”
3.
Britney Spears’s guest appearance helped “save” the show. In a 2014 Reddit AMA, Carter said, “We got a call a few weeks after the writers’ strike ended saying that Britney Spears wanted to be on our show. And she specifically wanted to be in the episode ‘Ten Sessions,’ which sent a chill down our spines, because that’s the one where we meet Stella. I immediately imagined Britney playing Stella and had a minor panic attack, because it’s such a big role and needed [a] proven, experienced actress like Sarah Chalke. But to her credit, Britney liked the character of Abby and wanted to play that part. So we said, ‘Sure!’ And by golly, she put our show on the map. It can’t be overstated. Britney Spears rescued us from ever being on the bubble again. Thanks, Britney!”
4.
Real-life couple Jana Rugan and Timothy Russo got engaged on the Season 2 finale! Since it’s Jana’s favorite show, Timothy got his brother, who’s a comedy writer with a friend on the HIMYM writing staff, to help him arrange a tour of the set. Timothy told the New York Daily News, “I told him the [proposal] plan, and, a few days later, I get a call from my brother, saying, ‘Do you want to propose on the show instead?’ I couldn’t believe it. I was, like, ‘What do you mean?’ He said in the season finale, they were writing in a proposal, and had planned to use extras, so [they] thought, ‘What a great chance to do it for real.'”
In the restaurant scene, Robin is served a champagne glass with an engagement ring in it that isn’t meant for her. The real-life couple was placed as extras during rehearsals, but when the cameras started rolling, the director gave the signal. Timothy said, “The actors are sitting at the table, and the woman says, ‘Whose ring is that?’ And the guy says, ‘I don’t know, it’s not mine,’ and then I get up from our ‘extras’ table and say, ‘It’s mine.’ And then I walked over and proposed to Jana. At first, she thought I was messing up the scene, then it dawned on her, and she started crying, and everyone was clapping. It was awesome.”
5.
Alyson Hannigan and Cobie Smulders were both pregnant for the first time while filming Season 4. Neither pregnancy was written into the show, and Alyson told Woman’s Day, “No, I think it would have been too soon for [Lily]. And the group spends a lot of time hanging out in the bar, so it wouldn’t really have worked.”
Both women hid their bellies by carrying props, like big baskets, and Robin spent more time at her news desk to hide Cobie’s pregnancy.
The only time Alyson didn’t hide her belly was in a flashback scene where Lily won a hot dog eating contest in the episode “The Possimpible.”
6.
However, Alyson’s second pregnancy was written into Season 6, with Lily being pregnant for the first time.
7.
The Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons tried out for the role of Barney Stinson. He told Live with Kelly and Michael, “It was one of the stranger experiences of my life. Because you know how it is to audition for things. They come out with character breakdowns and stuff, and on this one, it specifically said, ‘Barney, a big lug of a guy.’ And I remember thinking, I got it and was like, ‘Who the hell looked at me and thinks ‘big lug of a guy?’ And it wasn’t offensive. I thought, ‘This is silly.’ … Look, it all worked out fine… Neil’s better for the part, let’s be honest, and it all went that way.”
8.
On paper, Neil was not a fit for Barney at all. At the 2006 William S. Paley TV Fest, he said, “I got the call to come in on this, and it was written for like a 35-37 year old, heavy set, dark-haired guy. Like a Jack Black type. And so I clearly was not going to get that job! So I didn’t have any expectations at all. I thought it was really funny, and I was just sort of over pilot season and constantly going in and getting rejected for not being this or that. So I just went in and kind of made an ass of myself. I did the dive roll from the laser tag scene [from the pilot] in the room.”
“When I was leaving, Megan [Branman, the casting director] came running out and said, ‘They want to test you!’ I went back into their office, and they sat me down… and this never happened in my career! And they said, ‘We really want you to be Barney. You’re the guy that we want for this role.’ And as an actor, that’s very strange. You never hear that, and I thought they were kind of bullshitting me and seeing if they could lower my quote or something!” he said.
10.
Jason Biggs declined to play Ted Mosby. He told Sirius XM, “I was offered the role, and it’s probably my biggest regret, you know, on passing. I think I was in a phase of, at the time — it sounds so obnoxious to say right now — but at the time, it was like, ‘Okay, do I want to do TV?’ I don’t know that I was quite ready to go that route.”
11.
Series co-creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays told E! Online, “It’s funny — How I Met Your Mother just sort of happened naturally. It was actually the second thing we pitched. The first thing we pitched was the story of an Enron executive who gets sentenced by the judge to go teach at an inner-city high school, which, you know, sounds like a great show. But from page one, neither of us wanted to do any research. We were just kind of like, ‘I don’t know, it’s probably like this,’ and the whole thing just rang completely false. But the other idea was just, ‘Well, let’s write about our friends and the stupid stuff we did in New York.'”
They continued, “Yeah, that just came really naturally. But still, you can tell, like everything we sort of know about makes sense [on the show], and everything we don’t know about [is hokey]. Like, we have a friend who is an architect, and he’s always like, ‘Really?! Ted’s designing his own skyscraper at 28?'”
12.
Ted and Marshall were based on Carter and Craig, respectively. Likewise, Lily is based on Craig’s wife, Rebecca, who’s a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At the 2006 William S. Paley TV Fest, Craig said, “I said [to Rebecca], ‘We’re writing a pilot, and we’re going to make a character based on you.’ And she basically said, ‘That kind of freaks me out. I’ll let you do it if you can get Alyson Hannigan to play me. If you can get Willow!’ And somehow it happened!”
13.
Barney’s iconic catchphrase, “Legen…wait for it…dary,” was almost struck because the showrunners initially didn’t want him to have a catchphrase. Carter told Entertainment Weekly, “But we held onto that for, like, five minutes, and then that went out the window. He’s actually based on a friend of ours, and the idea of a catchphrase is real life because there are just some people that recycle the same thing over and over again because it works for them. And Chris [Miller] and Phil [Lord, the writers] were the ones who said that he needed some sort of metric by which to measure things, some word that describes the peak for Barney. What’s the best of the best?”
14.
Discussing the origin of Robin Sparkles, Craig told IGN, “In part, it was just that we thought Cobie could do it. Also, [Carter] and I really like writing songs. We’d written a lot of stupid, cheesy songs on Letterman for years, and we wrote fake musicals and a fake boy band and all this stuff. Also, Alanis Morissette kind of inspired it, to be honest. Because if you look at that stuff she did, just a couple of years before Jagged Little Pill came out, it’s really cheesy!”
He continued, “We watched all that [early Alanis Morissette] stuff, and we just said, ‘This would be too funny to do with Cobie.’ Basically, we said, ‘What if Robin was Alanis Morissette, if she hadn’t had anything else beyond that? If she never became legit?’ We thought it would be funny if Robin’s career dead-ended at the cheesy phase. We just thought it would be fun to do, and she just nailed it.”
15.
In 2008, Alyson told Digital Spy that she didn’t like kissing Jason Segel because he was a smoker. She said, “I cannot stand cigarette smoke. It’s like kissing an ashtray, and he’s trying to be polite by having gum or mints, but it doesn’t help. When we started the pilot [for the show] he was like, ‘Get me to stop smoking, I’ll be your best friend.’ So we did this bet where he would owe me $10 every time he had a cigarette. After the first day, he owed me $200. So he said, ‘I’m just quitting,’ and he quit cold turkey for about a year. It was fantastic but then…he got stressed out, and he started smoking again.”
16.
Cobie told Fan Carpet, “Robin was not a Canadian when I signed on for the show. She became one because apparently according to Carter and Craig, we’re exotic! Those were literally the words they used to me in Season 1. They were like, ‘Well, you know, I just feel like it’s really exotic,’ and I’m like, ‘I have never in my life been called exotic!'”
17.
Alyson had an interesting connection to Bob Saget, who voiced future Ted. She told Parade, “I babysat for Bob’s kids when I was a teenager. From when I was, like, 15 to 17, I was his babysitter. Isn’t that funny? And now, I mean, his kids are old enough that they could babysit my kids. I don’t see him much anymore. He has the easiest job on the show. He comes in sort of once a month and does all the voiceovers. I’ve seen him probably twice in the whole run of the show, maybe three times. He’s hardly ever there.”
18.
On the How We Made Your Mother podcast, Cobie said, “Josh [Radnor] and I had quite a few intimate scenes. And so I would try to, as much as humanly possible, before we would roll, whisper something to Josh that was just extremely inappropriate. We have something in acting called ‘the moment before,’ which is typically used in an audition [where] you have to land as soon as they roll…there’s been a whole life, so you have to create this moment before. So I felt, as a good scene partner, I should lay out what the moment before was. And typically, it was what we just did. And usually it was sexual.”
She continued, “I feel like I’m an amazing scene partner, and I’m just thinking about the other person and making sure that they’re comfortable, making sure that there’s a connection there. And so I would just sort of set us up before we actually started the scene in our speaking roles, just with like, ‘This is what just transpired between us.’ And usually, Josh would not be able to say anything, and his face would turn [beet red].”
Josh added, “She would time it in such a way that she would finish saying [it], she would stick the landing, and they would say ‘action,’ and I couldn’t speak… They’re fond memories, but I also was immobilized by Cobie’s visionary.”
19.
The “slap bet” was inspired by a running gag Carter had with a high school friend where they’d slap each other for fun. However, the network was concerned it was too silly
20.
On the “Slapsgiving” episode, Jason hit Neil in the face for real. Writer Matt Kuhn told Entertainment Weekly, “In rehearsal up to it, Jason wouldn’t actually connect, but he would say, ‘When we do this, I’m going to do it for real.’ It was two guys who would go to the limit for the show.”
21.
MacLaren’s Pub was inspired by McGee’s Pub in New York City, where Craig and Carter often met up during their time as The Late Show With David Letterman writers. The bar plays into the homage with a special menu of HIMYM-themed cocktails, including the Robin Sparkles, the Pineapple Incident, and the Wait For It………….
22.
Carter told Entertainment Weekly that, for the scene where Lily tells Marshall his dad died, Jason “wanted to feel Marshall’s shock as palpably as possible, so he chose not to read Lily’s dialogue beforehand. All he knew was the last word of Lily’s line: ‘it.'”
He said, “As the last words of Lily’s line — ‘he didn’t make it’ — left Alyson’s mouth, I had to look away, as did our director Pamela Fryman. It’s our job to watch what happens, but in this case, what Jason and Alyson were going through was so unbearably real…we just had to trust that when we got back to the edit room, it would all be in focus. (It was.) The last line in the scene was something Jason came up with in the moment. He said, ‘I’m not ready for this.’ None of us were.”
23.
Neil Patrick Harris’s husband, David Burtka, played Scooter, Lily’s high school boyfriend.
24.
Alyson’s husband and former Buffy the Vampire Slayer costar, Alexis Denisof, guest-starred as Robin’s co-anchor, Sandy Rivers.
25.
And Taran Killam, Cobie’s husband, played Barney’s coworker Gary Blauman.
26.
Neil told Rolling Stone that he believes the producers decided to end the show with Barney becoming a dad because he’s a father IRL. He said, “I love that they wrote that. That was a sweet little scene to film. I think they knew that I could probably channel what it was actually like to hold a one-minute-old. I just love. I love the end of that story for Barney.”
27.
Neil stood by Barney and Robin’s split. He told Rolling Stone, “I think it’s entirely appropriate that Barney didn’t end up with Robin. They said throughout the nine seasons that they were not supposed to be together. They said it through the entirety of season nine. The wedding itself… cornflower blue, Ted! Cornflower blue! Clearly, they were trying to accomplish something that was not meant to be. And then it wasn’t meant to be, and they had a great run at it. Barney is Barney. But he’s bested by one woman, his daughter.”
He continued, “I convinced them that the last words that Barney Stinson said on that show should be. ‘Daddy’s home.’ When he sees Robin later, and…she says, ‘How are you, daddy?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, I don’t think of you that way anymore.’ And she goes, ‘No, dork, you’re a dad.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And I looked at her and said, ‘Daddy’s home.’ In a different way. And I like that those were the last two words that he spoke. I think that’s great.”
28.
Cristin Milioti didn’t know she was auditioning to play the mother, Tracy McConnell. Her agent simply got a call inquiring about “a pretty significant arc in the last season of How I Met Your Mother.” She wasn’t allowed to tell anyone she’d been asked to audition, and when she traveled to LA for a screen test, she had to sign a big NDA before she could even get her sides.
She told BuzzFeed, “They gave me the sides, and they were all fake. It did not even have anything to do with How I Met Your Mother. It was like a fake scene between a boy and a girl. It was, like, nothing. They were locking the makeup trailer. I spoke with Carter and Craig and Pam [Fryman, the director] before my test, and they were so sweet, but I could tell everyone was really anxious. I was like, This seems like a lot for a red herring.”
29.
When Cristin was being considered to play the mother, production had one major concern — they were worried she looked too much like Alyson!
30.
When Cristin filmed her first episode (“Something New”), production was so dedicated to keeping the mother’s identity a secret that she had no script, and every extra on set was a member of production.
31.
The controversial ending was the series co-creators’ plan from the very beginning, and they never felt the need to alter it in any way. Ahead of the finale episode’s premiere, Craig told CBS News, “It’s been the plan all along. What you see on March 31 has been the plan. We leave the series with a certain message that we wanted to convey.”
32.
However, there was a plan B if the series got canceled early — the mother would be Victoria, the baker Ted dated in Season 1.
33.
Josh was aware of the twist ending early on. He told Vulture, “They had mentioned to me the twist about the mother in the first season, and I kind of put it out of my head. I didn’t know if they would actually want to come back to it and do that, especially after Cristin, because she was so wonderful, and the fans seemed to really take to her. So I asked them, ‘Are you guys still doing that?’ And they said yeah.”
34.
Josh also told Vulture, “They cut a scene [in the finale] that Cobie and I shot between Ted and Robin. I thought it was a really important scene, and I talked to Carter and Craig about it. I understand why they cut it, but I thought it laid in that Robin had been thinking about Ted all these years more than Ted had been thinking about Robin. But who knows? …It was a scene after they ran into each other on the street. They had lunch the next day. I don’t want to go too much into it because they obviously cut it for a reason, but I thought it was a really sweet and sad and funny scene.”
35.
And finally, David Henrie and Lyndsy Fonseca, who played Ted’s kids, shot their final scene eight years before the series ended. When the show entered its second season in 2006, series co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas elected to go ahead and film the scenes they needed for the finale before David and Lyndsey grew up. Both kids signed NDAs, and Lyndsey was so intent on keeping the ending a secret that she completely forgot!
What’s your favorite thing about HIMYM? Let us know in the comments!
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