niche drama

Rachel Bloom’s Twitter Spat With Neil Patrick Harris Definitely Wasn’t a Joke

Rachel Bloom, a.k.a. the woman in the top hat. Photo: Jim Spellman/WireImage

While live-tweeting the Tony Awards on Sunday night, former host Neil Patrick Harris noticed a woman in a top hat interviewing theater people backstage and tweeted out his son’s thoughts about her use of filler words. It could have seemed like a bit, given that the woman was Rachel Bloom, creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a musical TV show NPH might know about, given that liking musicals is sort of his thing, but according to Bloom, it definitely wasn’t. “I saw that tweet. And I was kind of devastated,” Bloom told GQ in an interview. “I’ve met him a couple times. Very recently, backstage in the dressing room of a Broadway show. And we hung out for a solid 15 minutes with the star of this Broadway show. It was just bizarre to me that it wouldn’t ring a bell. And also, that he wouldn’t Google it.”

Bloom responded to NPH on Twitter the night of the show, pointing out that her husband wrote for How I Met Your Mother, to which the actor responded with a non-apology “thanks for the reminder.” In the interview, Bloom points out “he’s not a writer, so his version of a Twitter joke is to just kind of … live-comment to Twitter followers with kind of random, unformed thoughts,” and adds that she and her husband have a framed photo from the HIMYM episode he wrote on their wall, so Harris’s dismissal was especially hurtful. “Look, he didn’t say that I was terrible. It was just kind of a random thing,” Bloom concludes. “But I think, if he wants to be gracious: He has 27 million Twitter followers. He could check out an episode of the musical TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — which is, right now, the only musical show on television. And tell his 27 million Twitter followers to check it out. I wouldn’t hate that!” That, or the final season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s going to include a bumbling famous villain called Nate Paige Horace or something.

Update: Harris has apologized to Bloom “as a performer and a parent” on Twitter, and Bloom accepted his apology, bringing this strange saga to an end.

Rachel Bloom’s Twitter Spat With NPH Wasn’t a Joke