Barney Stinson
Barney Stinson is a fictional character portrayed by Neil Patrick Harris and created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas for the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother.
One of the show's main characters, Barney is known for his brash, manipulative and opinionated personality. He is womanizer known for his love of expensive suits, laser tag, and Scotch whisky. The character uses many 'plays' in his 'playbook' to help him have sex with women. In later seasons, he has a few serious relationships, then marries, divorces, and has a child with an unnamed woman from a one-night stand, and then marries the same woman again. Barney's catchphrases included "Suit up!", “Go for Barney”, "What up?!", "Stinson out", "Legendary", "Wait for it", "Daddy's home", "Haaaaave you met Ted", “True story”, “That’s the dream!”, "Challenge accepted", "Just.. just... okay?", and "I only have one rule.".
Critics have praised the character and credited Harris’ performance for much of the show's success. Barney is considered the show's breakout character.
Development
The show's creators envisioned Barney as what Bays later described as a "large, John Belushi-type character"; nonetheless, Megan Branman, the casting director for How I Met Your Mother, invited Harris to audition. He assumed that he was invited solely because the two were friends and did not believe he had a chance of winning the role. Harris later said: "Since I considered myself in the long shot, I didn't care that much, and I think that allowed a freedom." His audition centered on a scene playing laser tag, and Harris attempted a dive roll, accidentally knocking over a chair and slamming into a wall in the process. CBS executives enjoyed his playing and soon offered Harris the part. Before Harris' casting, Jim Parsons auditioned for the role. The character is named for a heroin dealer in the James Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential.Character
Barney Stinson is one of five main characters on How I Met Your Mother. He is a manipulative, oversexed businessman in his thirties who always wears a suit, likes women with "daddy issues" and is frequently willing to offer his opinion. Throughout the earlier seasons, Barney is a huge womanizer, and has been described as a "high-functioning sociopath" by his best friend, Ted Mosby. Barney has a plethora of strategies and rules designed to meet women, sleep with them, and discard them. Through several seasons of the show, four of the main characters are couples, as Ted began dating Robin Scherbatsky and Ted's roommate Marshall Eriksen becomes engaged and later married to Lily Aldrin. This leaves Barney the only single character, and, according to Harris, Barney is "resentful" that the other characters have paired up. Later on, in season 5, he dates Robin. They end up breaking up not long after, once they both realize they are making one another miserable.Harris describes Barney as a man who "likes to create crazy situations and then sit back and watch it all go down." He is an opportunist who manipulates any situation so that it goes his way. He is also highly competitive, and will take on "challenges" to complete outlandish tasks in order to prove his worth by often announcing "Challenge Accepted". He is proud and stubborn, and attempts to stand by his word no matter what. In "I Heart NJ", for example, he refuses to put down his fist unless someone offers him a fist bump. By the end of the episode, he has the same fist elevated in a sling after struggling to keep his fist up throughout the episode. In "Lucky Penny", when the others do not believe that he can run the New York City Marathon the next day without training, Barney immediately agrees to do so. Although he succeeds, he is unable to walk afterwards. Although he thinks of himself as worldly, Barney is sometimes extremely naive, believing many lies his mother told him well into adulthood, such as believing that Bob Barker is his father.
Barney, like Harris himself, is an illusionist. His favorite types of magic tricks involve fire, as seen in the tenth episode of the second season, "Single Stamina" and in the fourth episode of the fourth season, "Intervention". Barney uses magic tricks mostly to pick up women. His most common method of picking up women is telling them elaborate lies about himself, often using an alias. Many of his schemes for picking up women are in a book he has written called "The Playbook", which is exposed in the episode "The Playbook". He has commitment issues, as evidenced in his reluctance to put a label on his relationship with Robin and the fact that she is one of the few women he has actually dated since the show started.
Barney is very well-connected and is the most affluent member of the group. He frequently buys expensive items—such as a last-minute plane ticket to San Francisco, thousands of dollars in postage stamps, or two televisions specifically for smashing in frustration—in the spur of the moment. He is also something of a metrosexual; he waxes his chest, enjoys manicures and has an extensive knowledge of designer labels and gourmet food. However, he is also seen to have a gambling problem that he occasionally gets under control, only to relapse as seen in several episodes such as "Atlantic City", where he has gambling buddies in the Chinese Triad, and "Monday Night Football".
Although The Early Show described him as "Utterly devoid of morality", Barney lives by the "Bro Code", his own code of ethics. Despite his overall questionable character, according to creator Craig Thomas, Barney is "a pretty fragile character who's really afraid of being alone. He just wants people to like him, to be important to people, and to have disciples who follow his word." He has displayed a softer, kinder side on several occasions, however, such as preventing Marshall from sleeping with other women when he and Lily break up, and persuading Lily to come back to Marshall.
In "The Slutty Pumpkin Returns", Barney finds out he is one-quarter Canadian due to his grandmother's Canadian ancestry, much to his horror and embarrassment.
Throughout the series, one major character development is apparent in Barney: At the beginning of the show, his character is a womanizer who completely objectifies sex and women and wants nothing to do with dating and relationships. Although he does date Robin in Season 5, he resumes his promiscuous lifestyle immediately after they break up. In Seasons 6 and 7, however, he begins to confront his personal issues, like his relationship with his estranged father and his fear of commitment. By the time late Season 7 rolls around, Barney has finally "grown up," and has now warmed to the idea of a commitment and marriage, culminating in his proposal to his girlfriend, Quinn. Although he briefly retreats to his escapades after he and Quinn break up, he does make one major final leap in his maturity when he burns The Playbook and proposes to Robin in Season 8's two-part episode "The Final Page," after finally admitting to himself that he is still in love with her. Robin accepts and they plan their wedding in the second half of the season.
The final season revolves around Barney and Robin's wedding weekend. After some apprehension on both their parts, they get married in "The End of the Aisle" after he vows to always be honest with her. The series finale, "Last Forever", reveals that, three years after their wedding, they get divorced because Robin's hectic travel schedule prevents them from spending any time together. Barney returns to a lifestyle of meaningless sex with multiple women for several years afterward, reasoning that if he could not form a lasting relationship with Robin it was not going to happen with anyone else, until he gets one of his one-night stands pregnant. He hates the idea of being a father until the day his child – a girl named Ellie – is born. He falls in love with her at first sight and becomes a devoted father, turning away from his player lifestyle for good. The series' alternate ending implies that following Ted's wedding, Barney and Robin eventually got back together.
In the spinoff How I Met Your Father, during the episode "Daddy", which takes place in 2022, main character Sophie Tompkins hits Barney's car. He has attempted to stop womanizing by telling every woman he meets that he is "in recovery" and apologizing if he tricked them into having sex with him at some point in the past; he also wears an ankle bracelet that delivers an electric shock every time he says something sexually inappropriate. Seeing Sophie's distress, he offers to cover the damages to the car if she tells him her problem, and she admits her fears of dating a man who could be her father. Barney bonds with Sophie over growing up without a father, and inspires her to start looking for hers, but cautions that doing so may not entirely resolve her issues.
Childhood and family
A few references have been offered to identify Barney's birthday: In "Natural History", Barney claims he was six years old on July 23, 1981. This puts his birthday somewhere between July 24, 1974 and July 23, 1975; in "Zoo or False", Ted says Barney was born seven years after the Moon landing, In "Columns" set in 2007, Barney gives his age as 31, further confirming his birth year is 1976. In "The Drunk Train" Marshall states Barney is a Scorpio which places his birthday between October 23 and November 21, 1976.He was raised in Port Richmond, Staten Island, by his mother Loretta, who was apparently very promiscuous. His father proved to be an ongoing mystery in the series. When Barney was young, he asked his mother who his father was, and as The Price Is Right happened to be on TV at the time, she pointed to Bob Barker and replied, "Oh, I don't know. That guy." Barney believed the lie wholeheartedly. Years later, as portrayed in the season 2 episode "Showdown", he appears on The Price Is Right with the intention of naming Barker as his father on national television until he panics at the last minute and cannot go through with it. As a child, Barney was terrible at sports, and from various episodes, it is shown he had few friends. In the episode "The Leap," Lily reveals that Barney planned on being a violinist when he was young.
In "Natural History", Barney finds out that a man named Jerome Whittaker, whom Barney believed to be his uncle, signed a form claiming to be Barney's father. Barney finally meets Jerome again in the episode "Legendaddy" and learns that he is in fact his father. Upon meeting, Jerome feels pressured to act like the hard-partying womanizer he once was in order to impress Barney, and also because Barney refuses to see him any other way. Barney eventually breaks down and accuses Jerome of walking out on him. Jerome, who can offer no excuse, apologizes and pleads with Barney to allow him to be a part of his life. Later in the sixth season, in "Hopeless", Jerome tries to impress Barney by acting like his old self, but later reveals he was just pretending. Barney, nevertheless, willingly listens to advice from Jerome about settling down. Barney also learns of his Canadian heritage, when he finds out that Jerome's mother was born in Manitoba. In the How I Met Your Father episode "Daddy", Barney reveals that Jerome is helping him raise his daughter Ellie, and credits both of them for inspiring him to be a better man for his family.
Barney has three half-siblings: James, from his mother's side, a gay African American who is married to a man, with whom he has an adopted son and daughter ; Carly, a university student from his father's side, whom Ted dates in the episode "Ring Up!", and Jerome Jr., from his father's side, who is 11. He also has a female cousin named Leslie, with whom he accidentally grinds in a nightclub, as seen in the episode "Okay Awesome".