Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik reveals ‘terrible’ incident that ruined friendship with Neil Patrick Harris

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Big Bang Theory star Mayim Bialik has revealed she had an awkward fallout with Neil Patrick Harris.

Before going to appear on two of the most successful sitcoms of the 2000s, Bialik and How I Met Your Mother’s Harris were friends.

However, this friendship deteriorated after a “terrible” incident in which she went to see Harris in a production of Rent when they were teens in 1997.

Bialik told James Corden on The Late Late Show that, at the end of the musical, everybody gave Harris a round of applause – but she refused to stand up to support her friend.

“I mean, this was a long time ago,” she said, “but when your friend is in the play and then everybody is clapping at the end, and you say to your boyfriend next to you, ‘I don’t want to stand for this’, and then you look up and Neil Patrick Harris is looking right at you – it’s a bad day.”

Bialik acknowledged that Harris was “amazing”, but said she told her boyfriend she didn’t want to give him a standing ovation as “it wasn’t my thing”.

She continued: “But that’s the time when you don’t say it out loud, because Neil was reading my lips, and when I went backstage to say hi to him, he said, I kid you not, ‘Why did you say you weren’t going to stand up?’”

“He read my lips,” she said. “I did not have a good answer. It was terrible. It was bad.”

Following that evening, the pair “didn’t speak for a long time”. However, after hearing she “still felt terrible”, he sent her flowers to clear the air.

Bialik currently presents gameshow Jeopardy! and appears in Call Me Kat while Harris will next be seen in The Matrix Resurrections.