Neil Patrick Harris talks about his 'sweetly creepy' role in 'Gone Girl'

NEW YORK, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- Emmy and Tony award-winning actor Neil Patrick Harris says he relished the chance to play a "sweetly creepy" character whose motives are mysterious for most of the film Gone Girl.

Like the novel on which it is based, the big-screen psychological thriller begins with the vanishing of beautiful Amy Dunne on the fifth anniversary of her wedding to Nick, a handsome, laid-off magazine writer whose ambivalent attitude regarding his wife's disappearance attracts the attention of both the police and the media, making him the prime suspect in the sensational missing-person case.

Rosamund Pike and Ben Affleck play Amy and Nick, while Harris plays Amy's wealthy ex-boyfriend and Tyler Perry plays Nick's press-savvy lawyer. The movie was helmed by David Fincher, the director of Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

"I was just fascinated with and in love with the book and script both; that all of the characters were relatively suspect throughout; everyone's character, really. It was kind of intentional that we were asked to play people that couldn't reveal too much," Harris said during a New York Film Festival press conference last Friday.

"That was an interesting conceit. ... I was over the moon to be a part of it. But I liked the element that I am not just creepy in the movie; that there is pathos to it. But then, no, I am creepy. Or, no, wait, maybe it's just sad. You know what I mean? I think everyone across the board is sad. I'm sweetly creepy. Which is a tattoo I just got."

"When I read Desi, I was like, 'I don't know anyone like this,'" Fincher confessed. "He's like Clare Quilty in Lolita. I was like: 'I have no idea. I have never met this person before.' And I just thought, 'You have to get the most watchable, present, like, quicksilver person you can find, so once we paint ourselves into a corner and have to have Desi come in and save the day, you have to be amazing.'"

Co-starring Carrie Coon, Kim Dickens and Patrick Fugit, Gone Girl opens in U.S. theaters Friday.