My Kids Told Me I Looked Disgusting

Neil Patrick Harris turns nasty in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

- Emma Bullimore

Any actor will tell you it’s fun to play the bad guy, and Neil Patrick Harris is certainly revelling in it.

The former star of How I Met Your Mother has joined TV&Satellite Week at a luxury hotel in Berlin to reveal all about his latest character, Count Olaf, the grotesque, money-grabbing villain in Netflix’s eight-part adaptation of popular children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events narrated by the enigmatic fictional writer, Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton).

‘Olaf represents pure evil, trouble and contempt,’ says Harris of his despicable character who steps in as guardian of three orphans – Violet (Malina Weissman), Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Sunny Baudelaire (Presley Smith) – in a bid to steal their fortune, but is regularly outsmarted by the trio.

‘It’s fun for me, because you don’t get to play that one-note awesomeness very often,’ he adds. ‘It’s like in