Neil Patrick Harris, What Was That?

Neil Patrick Harris paid the ladies of the View a visit this week and it was weird as hell.

The conversation starts out fine. Harris gabs about Halloween and Fortnite, as a father of young children could be expected to do, and then nose dives into some wonky-ass territory. Whoopi Goldberg, a View institution, starts chuckling because she recalls working with Harris when he was a child actor, about the same age his kids are now. Then Harris says this:

“You know, I did my first movie ever with Whoopi Goldberg. A movie called Clara’s Hart. She told me, I was 15, 16 years old, she told me on my last day of shooting that in 10 years time she was going to have sex with me.”

Goldberg looks a little awkward but immediately salvages the joke (?) with, “I might’ve!” Everyone laughs and she continues, “He had many questions as a kid, so I said, ‘Listen, wait 10 years, and I’ll take you through it. In those days, you could actually have some fun like that. You can’t do that now. People get very upset now.”

That’s also unusual, but then Harris jumps in with, “I’m not offended. I’m looking forward to it.” She retorts, “If I can find it, you can have it.”

I think Whoopi tried to make the best of a very, very strange situation, but I can’t help wondering what the heck is going on with Harris these days. As my colleague Ashley Reese pointed out, he’s been participating in some questionable behavior for a minute now: from his casually sexist “I don’t know her” tweet directed at Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom, a person whose husband worked with him for at least five years on How I Met Your Mother, to asking his 27.7 million Twitter followers to send him birthday gifts and then apologizing…I don’t know! What’s going on? And more importantly, what was that?