Neil Patrick Harris appears nearly blissfully ignorant to the flourishing reputation of Wondercade, his “labor of love” weekly newsletter by which the actor recommends meals, wine and life-style merchandise, affords type, health and journey suggestions, interviews well-known mates and co-stars, and, in attribute NPH magic-loving vogue, ends each difficulty with a puzzle or riddle.
“It’s weird because we come up with ideas and we do interviews, I edit it, and then it just goes,” Harris tells Yahoo Entertainment throughout a current Zoom interview. “I never know about it. I don’t know who’s reading it. I don’t know what their takeaway is. I don’t know whether they are looking forward to it. I hope they are. I’m proud of it.”
The beloved stage and display screen star is clearly doing one thing proper. Wondercade’s subscription button has been getting smashed left and proper. The Webby-nominated newsletter has racked up almost 200,000 subscribers since launching in October 2021.
Its subsequent logical development, which Yahoo Entertainment can now completely announce: Wondercade has expanded to a full-fledged website, now stay at Wondercade.com. “A carnival of comforts! A circus for the senses!” learn the taglines.
“The website was always sort of the next level of wonder, assuming that we would get a subscriber base that warranted it,” Harris explains. The interviews he does are abbreviated within the Wednesday newsletter, however can run full-length in weblog type. He’ll delve deeper into subjects. And the content material shall be archived.
The How I Met Your Mother and Uncoupled actor will proceed to do interviews (Keanu Reeves, Jimmy Kimmel, Chistina Hendricks, Cobie Smulders amongst them) whereas the positioning may even broaden its assortment of recipes from well-known cooks (Bobby Flay, Roy Choi, Andrew Zimmern, Kristen Kish) — to not point out his Le Cordon Bleu-trained husband David Burtka and twins Gideon and Harper — and embody ongoing suggestions from its well-known webmaster, together with unique product offers. Harris additionally teases hidden Easter Eggs all through the positioning that can take readers to hidden content material.
“I’ve been pretty diligent on making sure that the things are authentic and legitimate, and actual entertaining things that I wanna actually talk about,” Harris says. “Not life-altering conversations. Mind you, really, they’re extra diversion conversations of like the way to combine a higher drink or the place to go in Vegas to see cool stuff that is not plastered on a billboard.”
Wondercade.com evolves the newsletter’s evocative and artful yet simple aesthetic, which harkens back to the origins of its name. “Wondercade,” Harris explains, is a hybrid of the words “surprise” and the “old-timey” circus term “cavalcade,” which is the procession of animals and performers around the ring.
The expansion of Harris’s Wondercade brand won’t be limited to HTML.
In early May, Wondercade will release their first “IRL” product: a line of California rosé in partnership with Game Box Wines. That means, yes, again in NPHian/Wondercadian fashion, each wine box will come complete with puzzles, riddles and Easter Eggs on its packaging.
“It’s gonna be obtainable in wine outlets and liquor shops, which I like to discover, and now have much more purpose to,” cracks Harris. “But I got to taste-test the wine, and it’s really quite good. I don’t like my rosés to be dark in color, like a light red. I like them to be very dry, a very nice light pink. And this was great. I loved it.”
Between his newly acquired roles as editor in chief of the Wondercade newsletter and website, and artistic director of his personal wine line — to not point out being a devoted husband and father of two — it might be cheap to assume we’d see much less of Harris doing what he’s greatest identified for: performing.
But Harris stays as prolific as ever as performer, too. In the subsequent few months alone, he’ll be a part of Broadway’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong for a restricted visitor star run (marking the primary time he and husband David Burtka, who’s main a revival of God of Carnage, shall be onstage on the identical time), start manufacturing on Season 2 of Netflix-to-Showtime’s acclaimed rom-com collection Uncoupled, and seem in a sixtieth anniversary particular of BBC’s Doctor Who.
Discussion about this post