Neil Patrick Harris in ‘It’s a Sin’ is now showing

Neil Patrick Harris dishes on his role in the latest opus from Queer As Folk creator Russell T. Davies.

In a recent interview with the Variety podcast, “Just for Variety”, the actor-singer-comedian revealed he had been spending some of the pandemic shooting The Matrix 4 in Berlin where he enjoyed out trans writer-director Lana Wachowski’s “intimate” shoot. “It felt like she was in her sweet spot, which was filming on the fly, filming using natural light,” he revealed. “Sometimes you’d sit around for an hour waiting for the clouds to clear, and then you’d quickly film. You’d film pages at a time in 30 minutes and then be done.”

Harris said he thought Wachowski “wants to do things her own way now. It wasn’t often that you felt that you were doing something gigantic because she made it feel very intimate.”

Despite the low-key Berlin vibe, Harris reveals he still wants to do a big-budget super hero movie. But lately he is far from that world, featuring in British Queer As Folk auteur Russell T. Davies’ HBO Max’s limited series It’s a Sin, about a group of gay friends in London at the start of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Harris revealed he was aware of the AIDS pandemic and its affect on the industry when he was starting out, and the stigma around the virus.

In It’s a Sin, NPH plays an older gay man who is a rather suave mentor to a young man coming out in a crisis.

“I got on a phone call with Russell and his producing partner,” Harris says. “He told me about the idea, and that there was a character in it that he was interested in me playing. And I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’ And that was six months before. It was early on in the process. And then I thought it had gone away and then it appeared again and it was happening in earnest. And suddenly, I was in Manchester and learning an accent and growing a mustache and loving life.”

It’s a Sin premieres Feb. 18 on HBO Max.