Neil Patrick Harris has no issue with straight actors playing gay characters, says it’s ‘something sexy’

When it comes to debate over straight actors playing gay characters, Neil Patrick Harris has weighed in.

The openly gay actor, who came out in 2006, doesn’t see it as much of an issue; he actually celebrates it.

In a recently published interview with The Sunday Times, the former “Dougie Howser, M.D.” and “How I Met Your Mother” star weighed in on the comments made by acclaimed TV dramatist Russel T. Davies, who said he is against straight actors playing gay roles.

“I’m not one to jump onto labeling,” the 47-year-old show business veteran shared. “As an actor, you certainly hope you can be a visible option for all kinds of different roles.”

The five-time Emmy, and Tony Award winning actor and producer used his serial womanizer character on “How I Met Your Mother” to drive home his point.

“I played a character for nine years that was nothing like me,” Harris said before referencing Davies’ landmark series “Queer as Folk,” which starred three straight actors as gay men.

“It was one of the real true turning points for me as examples of sexy guys behaving as leads in something of import, not as comic sidekicks,” the married father of two elaborated. “There’s something sexy about casting a straight actor to play a gay role, if they’re willing to invest in it.”

“Queer as Folk,” which was initially a hit in the U.K. before Showtime adapted it for American audiences in the early aughts, was championed as the first hour-long drama on American television to portray the lives of white gay men and women.

Harris also added that mentality may force actors and actresses in uncomfortable situations and also limit their opportunities, explaining, “In our world that we live in, you can’t really as a director demand that... Who’s to determine how gay someone is?”

Davies, in a previous interview, expressed, “You wouldn’t cast someone able-bodied and put them in a wheelchair. You wouldn’t Black someone up. Authenticity is leading us to joyous places.”

When probed further about Davies’ comments, the former Tony, Emmy and Academy Awards host said he understood where the Welsh television producer was coming from, saying he was “speaking more about the joyfulness of being able to be authentic.”

A true showman, who played the cross-dressing genderqueer titular character in Broadway’s “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and graced the cover of Rolling Stone nude (with a bow tie and a top hat covering his private parts), Harris portrays a Savile Row tailor in Davies’ latest British TV miniseries “It’s A Sin.”

The drama, which HBO Max has acquired U.S. rights for, follows a group of young gay men who move to London in the 1980s amid the AIDS epidemic.