The Golden Globe-winner affirmed in an interview that his comment about her 'wasn't a joke'

The Tony Awards type Stage

Rachel Bloom told GQ in an interview published Wednesday that Neil Patrick Harris’ cryptic tweet from Sunday night, in which he seemingly criticized her comedy bits on the Tony Awards broadcast, left her “kind of devastated.”

Harris began live-tweeting the Tonys midway through Sunday’s show, and took a jab at Bloom by working off of his son Gideon’s observation. “Who is the woman in the top hat backstage at @TheTonyAwards?” Harris asked. “Gideon remarked that she says ‘like’ and ‘oh my god’ a lot. I’m confused…” Bloom promptly responded that she was a “big fan of his,” and that they’d met several times and her husband even wrote for How I Met Your Mother. To diffuse the tension, Harris then wrote back, “Indeed! Well said. Thanks for the reminder. How was backstage?”

Given their history and the unusual nature of the back-and-forth, GQ asked Bloom if their Twitter interactions were part of a “joke,” as some speculated. “No, no, no. It wasn’t a joke,” she clarified. “Basically… I saw that tweet. And I was kind of devastated. I was actually going to tweet, ‘This makes me sad.’ But then I was like, ‘Ehhhhhhhhhh… I don’t want to give him that, necessarily.”

Photos surfaced of the pair even sharing a scene in How I Met Your Mother. And Bloom made sure to note that it was strange he not only didn’t recognize her, but didn’t bother looking up who she was before sending that tweet out.

“I’ve met him a couple times. Very recently, backstage in the dressing room of a Broadway show,” she told GQ. “And we hung out for a solid 15 minutes with the star of this Broadway show. It was just bizarre to me that it wouldn’t ring a bell. And also, that he wouldn’t Google it.”

Bloom also took issue with Harris’ response, in which he thanked her for the “reminder,” noting it wasn’t an apology. She said, “And I guess what I would say is, the thing he said in response [to my tweet] wasn’t really an apology as much as saying, like, ‘Well said! Thanks for the reminder.'” (She later added: “Look, he didn’t say that I was terrible. It was just kind of a random thing.”)

As to how Bloom feels about Harris’ slight now? She noted to GQ she found the whole situation a little disturbing, if only because of Harris’ apparent comfort tweeting out something like that without doing research first: “Fame does that to you — where you think every kind of random, unformed thought is a gem, because you get 10,000 likes from it. He has, like, 27 million Twitter followers. And that makes me scared about fame in general. The yes-men. Even if what you’re saying is, I don’t know, kind of weird or unoriginal, you’re still getting a lot of approval and dopamine surges for saying it. And I really, really hope that I can surround myself with people who will call me out on my s—, so that — even if I ever were to have 27 million Twitter followers — I would be just kind of… a person first, and a famous person second.”

Shortly after Bloom’s interview was published, Harris issued an apology on Twitter: “Sincere apologies to [Rachel Bloom] for my Tony tweet. I failed to research her before pressing ‘send,’ and what I thought was a funny comment in our living room must have been far from funny to read, backstage, mid show. As a performer and a parent, I should have know better.”

You can read Bloom’s full interview with GQ here.

This post has been updated with Harris’ tweet.

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