The Elusive Charm of Cobie Smulders Issue #41

Despite her efforts to avoid the spotlight, the How I Met Your Mother star is the brightest thing in primetime

By Mila Zuo
Published: September 1st, 2009 | 3:41pm

Like her character Robin Scherbatsky, Cobie Smulders was animated and funny when we caught up with her, ruminating on past experiences with impersonations and laughter. Chatty and candid, the new mom cooed at her baby and peppered our conversation with exclamations about how her life has changed while gleefully advocating parenthood, urging me to “Have one! Oh it’s awesome.” The star of CBS’ ensemble sitcom How I Met Your Mother — an inventive, diabolically funny, and edgy trajectory in the upwardly-mobile 20-somethings genre — spoke with us over the phone after recently giving birth to daughter Shaelyn with fiancé Taran Killam.

The Vancouver-born 27-year-old, née Jacoba Fransisca Maria Smulders, entered the entertainment business as many beautiful women do — by becoming a model. Smulders recalled, “When I was 12, I had a girlfriend who was beautiful and I idolized her a little bit and she was a model.” After her friend made the proper introductions to a modeling agency, Smulders began traveling to New York, Japan, and Europe during school breaks to model internationally. Smulders quickly found that she “kind of hated” modeling, but was seduced by its perks. “I’m traveling. I’m in Europe. I’m living in Italy. I’m living in New York and I’m living here for free. I’m meeting all these great people, and it was just sort of fun. You know, I’m 19 years old, and so I enjoyed it for that. But it just really wasn’t my bag,” she explained. After moving back home to Canada, Smulders began studying theater, but didn’t seriously consider acting as a profession. “When I was younger, I think [Vancouver] had X-Files and it was just starting to create this industry up there. So, I didn’t ever consider it to be a career choice,” she said. Smulders also admitted that her insecurities contributed to her initial hesitance about acting. “You know you go into these rooms, and I’ve had the experience of people judging you physically for so long and I was over that. But then it was like, ‘Oh no, I have to actually perform. I have to do well, and I have to have a voice, and I have to have thoughts now.’”

Despite her ambivalence towards the auditioning process, which she admits is still somewhat tough for her, Smulders’ ability to flesh out three-dimensional characters was quickly tested when she began to be cast in small roles in popular television series such as Smallville and The L Word. While playing a young artist named Leigh Ostin, lusted after by two of the leads in Showtime’s lesbian drama, Smulders translated her modelesque beauty into on-screen charisma, effortlessly displaying her broad sex appeal. As for her insecurities, her craft has helped Smulders work through self-consciousness. She explained, “It’s so funny how acting is like therapy in a sense where you have to be grounded and you have to be okay with yourself and you have to be confident. You have to be that in your real life, too.”

Even though she had never acted in a comedy before How I Met Your Mother, Smulders’ latent comic was cultivated since childhood. “In my family, I was always wanting to make people laugh, wanting to make people smile and I think that just moves over into your career or into your craft when you decide to be an actor,” she said. However, after a string of dramatic parts, the prospect of landing a comedic role seemed dim. “Before I got How I Met Your Mother, I was doing only dramas and was never even considered for comedies. And the business is a weird thing, you sort of get type-cast,” she remarked. Hollywood’s regurgitative casting ritual nearly eclipsed Smulders’ inner comedienne for good. However, if taken from a scripted page, two weeks prior to landing a sitcom role, Smulders nearly swore off sitcoms because of the high-stress and pressure associated with TV comedy production. “A friend of mine was doing a sitcom at the time, and I went to his live taping. It was so stressful,” she said. “There’s a live audience here and you’re getting these lines like, the day of. Everything is improvised and sort of on the fly, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I would never be able to do that.’ And literally, two weeks later, I was doing How I Met Your Mother.”

Fortunately for the ever-dwindling network audience, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, the creators for the show, chose Smulders for the part assuring her, “You are Robin. You are Robin incarnate,” according to Smulders. Robin, described by Smulders, as “cool, confident, more of a tomboy” is a tough, wise-crackin’ broadcast reporter who would rather reach for a tasty cheeseburger than her boyfriend’s hand. As Smulders inhabited the role, Robin also became more Cobie-like, even becoming Canadian, which manifested in a number of “exotic” quirks, like being afraid of the dark and mispronunciations of words like “sorry” and “about” with hilarious effect. Buried in Robin’s immigrant past also lies Canadian teen pop stardom, under the stage name Robin Sparkles. Parodies of ‘80s pop culture, complete with guest appearances by bygone pop stars like Tiffany, Robin Sparkles’ music videos “Let’s Go to the Mall” and “Sandcastles in the Sand” featured Smulders in full period regalia and showcased her impressive singing abilities — and have become viral sensations on the Web. Smulders quickly adapted to the improv feel of the show and came to love the slapstick element of sitcom. Highlighting the artistic liberties in television, Smulders remarked, “That’s the great thing about working with tape, there’s no film involved so there’s no, ‘Well, there’s the budget and we only have so much film.’ We have tape, so we can just do take after take, after take, after take, and it doesn’t matter.” Taking advantage of the low production cost, the cast gives plenty of input to the writers regarding the scenes and dialogue of their characters, creating a collaborative on-set environment.

In a recent turn of events on the show, romance began to bud between Robin and the best friend of her newly minted ex, Barney, an unabashed womanizer played by Neil Patrick Harris. Though the romance was recently conceived, Smulders admitted that she always thought the two should end up together, and indeed Robin and Barney seem remarkably similar in their quick wit, sarcastic bravado, and fierce independence. However, remaining sensitive to the reality of an otherwise traumatic situation, Smulders said, “You always worry about likeability and the reality of a situation, which would be that I would be horrified if I slept with my ex-boyfriend’s best friend. I just wanted to keep the integrity of the relationship and not just make it like, ‘Oh, and that happened and we’re moving to something else.’” Smulders made efforts to ensure that the dynamic within the love triangle remained believable, such as removing her character from scenes where Barney brags about having sex with a bunch of girls. She wanted to avoid the storyline developing into the “Ross-Rachel thing where we get together and then we break up and then we get together.” These self-conscious concerns keep the show fresh, hilarious, and one step ahead of its network peers.

While working in an ensemble cast can be challenging for some personalities (think Shannen Doherty, in any endeavor), Smulders seems genuinely grateful to be working alongside her fellow cast members. The family dynamic allows Smulders to find relief in her work when real life gets difficult, as she explained, “Because I am so close to everyone at work, I can be like, ‘Listen, shit has happened. Leave me be. Give me space. I just have to get through the day.’ And they do. And you do,” said Smulders. “It’s such a great dynamic that I never thought would be possible. We’ve worked together for five years, and it seems like such a crazy long time and you read about all these other shows where it’s like ‘this person hates that person and they can’t work together and they don’t talk to each other when they’re not working.’ You know, I could not work like that! I couldn’t live my life like that. And I think we’re so lucky to be with such a great group of people. I think it’s very rare.”

As for Smulders’ peers in Hollywood, she has always managed to avoid the grossly oversaturated young Hollywood scene. Does the cult of young female celebrity defined by the Hilton-Lohan-Spears school of etiquette negatively affect young women today? “Totally, absolutely. It makes it seem more romantic. It makes it seem more important for some reason because it is in magazines and it is in print,” Smulders replied. “I feel like whenever I get analytical about it, it’s like, well in the olden days, we had the royal family and it was a monarchy and there was a system ... and now we don’t have that, so it’s like, okay, we can look at celebrities and see what their lives are like and see what they’re doing. I just wish there were better role models, or that the focus wasn’t on people who were making mistakes or making fools of themselves.” Smulders was lucky in that she got that behavior out of her system at a very young age. She explained why she’s resistant to the lure of the TMZ spotlight, “I’ve always been over the Hollywood scene of ‘Oh, look at her. What’s she wearing?’ and ‘So-and-so is in cahoots with this person.’ It’s never really been my scene. I don’t know if that’s because I wasn’t raised around it, or I was raised in a different country and it just wasn’t a part of our society so much,” Smulders said. She even relayed a future conversation she would have with her daughter: “Be true to yourself, and be honest, and listen. And you know, be friendly and open to others and be healthy. Oh God! That is the big scary thing,” she said, “It must be so hard to be a teenager these days. I can’t even imagine. I mean, when I was a teenager, smoking was like ‘Oh My God, this is crazy,’ and now there’s so much sex and drugs in media. I hope we have some better role models soon, and if I can be a part of that, I will be.”

A mainstream star minus the mainstream vanity, Smulders is an indie muse who prefers keeping close friends over playing to the paparazzi. When asked if she has ever been swarmed by adoring fans, Smulders laughed, “I don’t really ever get anything like that. I don’t. I live my life under the radar somehow.” And by the way, Smulders is not a fan of the ubiquitous celeb-narcisscism cultivated through myriad Internet surveillance sites. “I don’t know what Twitter is, I don’t really know what Skyping is. But I’m kind of turning into an old lady in that sense where I’m like, ‘So people will actually post, I’m going to the store now’ and people will read and respond to that?’ I don’t understand that. Just call me on the phone. Send me an email in the worst case scenario,” Smulders laughed. “But no, I’m not into the whole surveillance thing, and Facebook itself freaks me out sometimes.” To Smulders, flying under the radar is a cause for celebration, like in the instance of her daughter’s birth. “We were just not going to make an announcement about it, and then they’re like, ‘Okay, people found out about it so they’re going to print something,” she said. “At least we had seven weeks of nothing!” A rare creature in Hollywood, Smulders enjoys being a recluse in her Venice Beach home as she witnesses her daughter growing and “becoming more of a person.”

A testament to the power of comedy, Smulders not only finds relief in her work, she also invokes Robin outside of the show. “I think that the element of her attitude in terms of her confidence and the way she acts around boys affects me. And also because when working with the guys so much, you sort of fall into this rhythm. You just become a tomboy when you’re not around women so much, and when your character is written to be more masculine, it sort of comes into my life I find,” she reflected. Finding a niche in the boys’ club seems unlikely for a stunner like Smulders, but she is drawn to “the jockeyness of it, like, fart jokes or whatever. You become less sensitive to things. You want to be one of the boys,” she said. And become one she did — figuratively speaking, in her comical embodiment as the woman who out-manned and tamed television’s biggest Lothario. Smulders embodies the new woman who’s emerging from the ashes of outdated and static ideals of femininity — and at just the right time. Escaping definition, Smulders’ androgynous charm gives a new, perhaps French-Canadian, twist on that elusive je ne sais quoi and gives us all a new kind of female role model.

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Want more awesome women in television? Check out our list of 100 Most Important Women in the History of Television in the same issue, Fall 2009. Also, check out our Q&A with another CBS sitcom star, Simon Helberg of Big Bang Theory.