Josh Radnor, best known for playing the protagonist Ted Mosby in Carter Bays and Craig Thomas’ popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM), has confesseed he’s “not even a little bit close” to his co-stars from the show today. It’s been 12 years since How I Met Your Mother concluded its memorable nine-year television run.

Josh Radnor’s differences with Neil Patrick Harris

On the Half the Picture podcast, when asked if he is still close to his How I Met Your Mother co-stars, Josh Radnor said, “No. Not even a little bit. I don’t mean that in any dramatic way. It’s just… We had Neil (Patrick Harris) on the podcast, and he and I had a really interesting conversation about some of the tension we had on set that was fascinating and kind of healing.” Neil Patrick Harris broke through with HIMYM, playing Ted’s close friend and playboy Barney Stinson.

Earlier this year, Neil was a guest on How We Made Your Mother, a podcast hosted by Radnor and How I Met Your Mother co-creator Craig Thomas. “I always kind of felt that that my performance annoyed you, Josh,” Neil told his co-star on the podcast, much to his pleasant surprise.

“I was very indifferent to the heart and the pathos of it because I wasn’t written that way. And I know that was your job, right? I remember often when we were filming, and I sensed frustration from you because you wanted the scene to be like a good scene and I was looking at you like, ‘Motherfu*ker, I’m doing spit takes,'” added Neil.

He clarified that his intention wasn’t to air any “dirty laundry”, but point out to the fact that their different perspectives coming and clashing together is probably what made the show memorable.

How I Met Your Mother aired from 2005 till 2014.

Josh Radnor also acknowledged that, but attributed it to the blurring of the lines between the character and the actor. “Barney was often incredibly almost dismissive of Ted, and you were so good at playing that. I think sometimes I felt dismissed by Neil, but I was being dismissed by Barney,” argued Radnor, adding that he was “delighted by our weird chemistry.”

Neil Patrick Harrs also clarified that it’s not an “unresolved issue” he’s been harbouring all along, but just an observation in hindsight because at the time they were in the thick of the show, there was a “disconnect” that he could feel. “I just remember being at craft service or something and you were personally just more like buddy buddy with Jason (Segel), and that we’d say hey to each other or whatever, but like we were sort of doing different shows when we were filming it. I remember thinking ‘Is Josh mad at me?’ a lot. Like ‘Am I doing something to annoy him?,'” confessed Neil.

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Radnor also revealed that he did feel as the show’s protagonist, yet having done lesser shows than most of his co-stars, that he had a “harder adjustment with losing my anonymity.”

“I didn’t know how to process this in a way that felt healthy, other than kind of trying to keep it at arm’s length,” he added, apologizing to Neil for being “a little pissy.”

How I Met Your Mother had a run of nine seasons and 208 episodes.

He also confessed to doubting whether his “heart-forward thing” was less “valuable” than Neil’s comedy. “It took me a long time to realize that the task that I was given, I was doing it really well. And I’ve actually gone back and kind of forgiven myself for being so hard on myself in those years,” said Radnor.

Josh Radnor’s equation with other How I Met Your Mother co-actors

After confessing to having “healed” from the friction he had with Neil Patrick Harris during the filming of How I Met Your Mother, Josh Radnor pointed out that he isn’t terribly close to his other co-stars either. He revealed that him and Jason Segel, who played Marshall on the show, exchange texts to each other “once in a while”, but haven’t seen each other in a “really long time.”

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Cobie Smulders, who played Robin on How I Met Your Mother, has been a guest on Radnor’s podcast a few times, but as a result, they’ve only interacted with each other over Zoom. As far as Alyson Hannigan (Lily) is concerned, he last met her in his 2024 wedding with psychologist Jordana Jacobs. He compared his bonding with his former co-stars to what one has with one’s college batchmates.

“I have love for all these people. It’s like college, where you have this very intense time together, and you think you’re going to be… You can’t imagine not seeing each other every day because you’ve seen each other every day for so long. And then it just disperses, and you just go out and live your life,” explained Radnor.

More than friends, he looks at them as his “family” whom he didn’t get to choose when they were cast together in How I Met Your Mother 21 years ago. “And family dynamics come out to play when you’re in an environment like that for so long. But you also have love that is quite deep and rich and probably everlasting, but it’s not an active love. Acting is like love affairs that you have, and then you move on,” added the actor.

Meanwhile, his How I Met Your Mother co-stars Jason Segel and Cobie Smulders recently starred together in Apple TV’s popular show Shrinking, co-created by Jason, Bill Lawrence, and Brett Goldstein. While Jason plays the protagonist Jimmy Laird, a therapist struggling with the death of his wife, Cobie pops up as Sofi, Jimmy’s new, reluctant love interest, in season 3 earlier this year.

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How I Met Your Mother, which originally aired on CBS, premiered in 2005. It ran for nine seasons and 208 episodes, all the way up till 2014. It revolves around Ted narrating to his children how he met their mother, whose identity is kept a secret right till the end of the show. It also had a spin-off, How I Met Your Father, starring Hillary Duff.