The Insider.com

Neil Patrick Harris plays quite the ladies man as "Barney" on the popular sitcom How I Met Your Mother, but growing up as famous child actor made his dating situation complicated and quite the anti-Barney.

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For this Pop Culture Rewind, we take you back 20 years to an interview with Harris about the show that made him famous, Doogie Howser, M.D.

In the featured flashback, Harris talks about what it was like for him to grow up under the spotlight of Doogie Howser and how "normal" his childhood was.

While he generally dispels any notion that growing up famous negatively affected his life, he reveals that it's harder that one would think for him to meet girls.

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Away from the retrospective revelation that Harris and the interviewer are speaking about meeting girls (he is openly gay and has admitted to discovering his sexual preference at a young age), he describes himself as the direct antithesis of his future sitcom character when he discusses his dating life.

"In a normal situation, you would go to a place where there would be...a lot of [your] peers and you would theoretically not have high morals and so you just go and just talk to someone and make a fool of yourself or whatever," the then-18-year-old says.

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"If nothing clicks, then you move on the next person. In a situation like mine, you can't exactly do that. I mean, you can't exactly just jump into a place where there's a bunch of your peers because you're getting noticed already. Then, to just go up and ask someone out is kinda weird 'cause you don't know whether they're gonna go out with you for bad reasons."

What would Barney say to that?

Previous Pop Culture Rewind: Christina Aguilera Predicts the Future