10 Actors You Probably Forgot Were In Sci-Fi Movies
5. Neil Patrick Harris - Starship Troopers (1997)
These days Neil Patrick Harris is best known for his work on the stage and as the womanising Barney Stinson on the hit sitcom How I Met Your Mother but it was a different story in the late 1990s.
Even then, his appearance as Johnny Rico’s psychic best friend Carl Jenkins in Paul Verhoeven’s brilliantly biting sci-fi satire Starship Troopers felt out of place.
Up until that point, Harris was best remembered as the child star of the medical drama series Dougie Howser, MD, playing the titular teenage physician.
Starship Troopers represented a major change of pace for the seemingly innocent star, who went from the PG fun of Dougie Howser to the certificate 18 blood, guts and occasional nudity of Verhoeven’s movie.
He does a solid enough job as Jenkins, one of the brains upstairs in the battle against the film’s bug adversaries.
Still, it even represents something far removed from what followed next, whether comparing it to his knowing appearances as a fictionalised version of himself in the Harold & Kumar movies or as Count Olaf in the Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events.