Neil Patrick Harris Slammed for Amy Winehouse Meat Platter
Actor Neil Patrick Harris plays the part of “The Baker” in the critically-hailed revival of Into the Woods at New York’s City Center.
But the actor is whipping up a different frenzy online after photos resurfaced of a plate arranged for his 2011 Halloween party to resemble the corpse of Amy Winehouse—only three months after her death.
Winehouse, a world-wide celebrity and multiple Grammy-winning singer had long struggled with drug and alcohol abuse before she passed away due to alcohol poisoning that same year.
The grizzly photos of the plate featured a place card which read: “The Corpse of Amy Winehouse” and described the meat dish as “Beef ribs, pulled pork, chicken sausage in a spicy BBQ sauce,” according to reporting by Buzzfeed.
Fans of the singer were outraged over the photo more than ten years later, with reactions online ranging from “ “grotesque,” to “disgusted“ and “gratuitously weird and cruel.”
Y’all, the Neil Patrick Harris/Amy Winehouse thing is even worse than it looks because that wasn’t a cake, it was a meat platter made to look like her dead body. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Google it. You will be disgusted and no longer a NPH fan.
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) May 14, 2022
Others reflected on the treatment of Winehouse and other women celebrities of the time, whose mental illness and addictions some say had been exploited.
Harris’s publicist told The Daily Beast that the actor declined to comment about the resurfaced photo.
The picture had been posted to Twitter and quickly deleted by partygoer Justin Mikita, who is now married to Modern Family actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson. Attempts by The Daily Beast to reach Mikita were unsuccessful.
The shocking gaffe resurfaced just as Harris, best known for his role in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, returned to the stage.
Representatives at New York City Center did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time fans thought Harris had been insensitive.
In 2018, he was slammed for his treatment of star Rachel Bloom at the 2018 Tony Awards when he tweeted asking who “the woman in the top hat backstage” was and noted the repeated use of the words “like” and “oh my God.”
Bloom had replied “We’ve met numerous times and my husband, Dan Gregor, wrote for How I Met Your Mother for five years. Notably, he wrote the episode where your character finally meets his father,” according to Buzzfeed.
Harris apologized three days later.
Get the Daily Beast's biggest scoops and scandals delivered right to your inbox. Sign up now.
Stay informed and gain unlimited access to the Daily Beast's unmatched reporting. Subscribe now.