“I’ve embraced the glitter,” Neil Patrick Harris tells Good Morning America. “It’s everywhere.”
The actor has taken on the lead role in the Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which opens this month.
In the interview, composer Stephen Trask and creator and originator John Cameron Mitchell call Harris’s transformation “stunning” and say that he has been “reinvented.”
Becoming Hedwig takes Harris two hours, a process that takes place in his dressing room, which he had painted pink in honour of his character. He also reveals that he’s lost 20 pounds to look more feminine for the role.
“I’m becoming like Jared Leto manorexic,” he jokes.
“For me, it’s fun to play Hedwig and start the show with a lot of people kind of quizzically staring at me and thinking it’s for shock value and by the end feeling like they’re united with her,” Harris says. “That’s a really fun journey to get to take.”