Neil Patrick Harris on his ‘awful’ role in Netflix’s ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’

The How I Met Your Mother star transforms into the devious criminal for the upcoming Netflix series and says he’s thrilled to be playing a “truly awful” character.

Netflix’s adaptation, based on the best-selling books by Lemony Snicket (the pen name of American writer Daniel Handler), sees Harris shine as the murderous Olaf, set on seizing the inheritance of the three orphaned Baudelaire children.

“Realistically, he has to be truly awful for the kids to be that threatened by him, and yet this is a show that’s playing to teenagers as well as adults,” Harris tells news.com.au, adding that Handler himself confirmed that there’s no layer of niceness to the antagonist at all. “He’s just awful,” the 43-year-old actor said.

“It’s fun because as a bad guy in this I also look nothing like myself ... I could be as awful as I could possibly be.

“Since Olaf is just horrible, it freed me up to just be awful times 10. So it was super fun,” he added. “I was just awful. Awful, awful, awful.”

When the first photos of Harris dressed as Olaf emerged back in April, looking terrifying with an overgrown unibrow, menacing scowl and oddly slicked-back hair, fans of the beloved children’s book series — and fans of the Broadway superstar himself — grew instantly excited.

But slipping into character was a lengthy process, with the funnyman revealing it took more than two-and-a-half hours each morning during filming for makeup artists to master the prosthetics.

“It became part of the job, part of the scene was the transformation of being Olaf, and so that took so much time that it actually became its own meditation kind of mantra,” Harris said.

“It was challenging throughout the day because sweat was not your friend, and you had people constantly poking at your face all day. That was a bit jarring.”

In 2004, the popular book series was turned into a movie starring Jim Carrey as Olaf, with mixed reviews. The film covered the plot of three books but unfortunately wasn’t a big enough hit to warrant a sequel to tackle all 13 books.

Harris says in taking on the eccentric villain more than a decade after his fellow funnyman, he wanted to “make sure it was completely different from Jim Carrey’s take on it.”

“Jim Carrey has made an amazing career out of adding Jim Carrey to the character that he plays and so my take on his Olaf is that it was a Jim Carrey version of Olaf and that’s fun to watch because he’s hilarious,” Harris said.

“But I just really wanted to be more Elizabethan and more Shakespearean. I was really wanting to honour Daniel’s [Handler] take on it.”

So what did he do?

“I went pretty dark. I never ever approached it as though it’s a kids’ piece at all,” the actor said.

“The only way Olaf works as a villain is if he’s a villain. That brazen disregard for the kids’ age and his single focus of destroying whatever is necessary to gain their financial wealth is what keeps them scared. If he has remorse, or if he pulls it back then you think as a viewer that there’s going to be some redemption of some sort.”

While he’s suitably sinister and creepy as Olaf, Harris, who has two young children with husband David Burtka, said he made sure his kids were a part of the transformation process so they fully understood what was going on.

The adorable tots, six-year-old twins Gideon and Harper, watched their dad as he was plied with makeup and prosthetics to ‘become’ Olaf.

“I’m a big fan of our kids having knowledge of the process,” he said. “They would watch the process of how I got into the makeup, we even did timelapse in the makeup room so that when I was FaceTiming with them in character they weren’t really freaked out.”

The eight-episode Netflix event, also starring Patrick Warburton and Joan Cusack, premieres on January 13.