How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor has admitted the cast of the Friends-style CBS sitcom aren’t nearly as chummy as you might imagine.
Radnor played the perennially unlucky-in-love Ted Mosby, who spent nine seasons telling his kids in the future how he came to meet their mum.
Much of the years in the lead-up were spent down his New York local sinking drinks with pals Marshall (Jason Segel), Lily (Alyson Hannigan), Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris).
But when the 52-year-old actor was asked on the Half the Picture podcast if the quintet is ‘still as close’ as they were when filming the show, Radnor responded: ‘No, no, not even a little bit… I don’t mean that in any dramatic way.’
Referring to his How I Met Your Mother rewatch podcast with show co-creator Craig Thomas, Radnor explained: ‘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.’
On a two-part episode of the How We Made Your Mother podcast in March, the 53-year-old and Radnor discussed ‘frustrations’ while filming, particularly centring on how Patrick Harris focused on the comedy, while Radnor was more preoccupied with the emotionality.
‘I remember often days when we were filming and I sensed frustration from you because you wanted the scene to be a good scene and I was looking at you, like, motherf***** I’m doing spit takes,’ said Patrick Harris, laughing.
‘As it was happening, I was like, I think Josh is annoyed by the gnat flying around all the time, just doing bits.’
Radnor echoed Patrick Harris and said he thought, in hindsight, he experienced a degree of confusion between the actor and the character.
He explained: ‘Barney was often dismissive of Ted and you were so good at playing that, that I think I sometimes felt dismissed by Neil, but I was being dismissed by Barney… But when I look back on it, I’m so delighted by our weird chemistry.’
Radnor described it as the ‘secret sauce’ in their on-screen relationship, as Patrick Harris reiterated that they were essentially playing different shows and as a result he sometimes thought Radnor was ‘mad’ at him.
In the same podcast episode, Radnor described struggling with the loss of his anonymity as he became the star of the hit sitcom, having come into it with few prior screen experiences compared to his co-stars.
Elsewhere in the Half the Picture podcast, Radnor said that he still messages Segel and Smulders ‘every once in a while’ when he’s reminded of something funny that happened on set. He said he last saw Hannigan at his wedding to Jordana Jacobs in 2024.
‘I have love for all these people,’ he said. ‘It’s like college, where you have this very intense time together and you can’t imagine not seeing each other every day cause you’ve seen each other every day for so long, and then it just disperses and you go out and live your life.
‘I think it’s a little more like family than friends in that you don’t get to choose your family. We were cast. We didn’t choose each other. 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.’
