‘A Series Of Unfortunate Events’: The Secrets Behind All Of Count Olaf’s Many, Many Disguises

Count Olaf is the worst. He’s vile and cruel and a terrible actor, to boot. Which is why his dreadfully bad disguises are also one of the best parts of A Series of Unfortunate Events.

Actor Neil Patrick Harris protested when he was asked to choose his favorite “Count Olaf disguise” at a recent Netflix press event: “Oh, it’s so hard to pick! I get to play one character for 27 days, shooting days. So that’s a long time to be someone else. And then I never am that person again and I’m somebody else again.” 

Even if Harris refused to name a favorite, he did take us on a journey through the inspiration behind the cavalcade of characters Count Olaf dreams up.

“I found of each of them markedly challenging in their own way,” he said, starting with Stephano in Season 1. “I had to shave my head bald and wear big coke bottle glasses that I really, physically couldn’t see through, so that was jarring. Oh, I had a beard, so I really couldn’t eat.”

“Then Shirley was drag, so that was playing against type, but also wearing pads and being very curvy, but involved random makeup and a different voice — that was fun. Saucy. I could talk saucy to the crew to make them flustered,” he said. “Captain Sham was fun, but he had a peg leg and an eyepatch, so it was hard to walk…had to figure that one out.”

That was then, but what about now? Where did Harris get the idea for the turban-wearing Coach Genghis? Look no further than a former Vice President and a popular true crime podcast… “I wanted his voice to be ‘midwestern P.E. coach’ meets Dr. Phil or Al Gore. That kind of deeper sort of ‘I speak truths even though you could tell from my inflection that I just like the sound of my own world.’ A little Forrest Gump-y,” Harris said. “It was actually based on a podcast called S-Town that has a guy named John B. McLemore who is the protagonist in that.  I was trying to come up with a voice for Genghis, which is its own tricky dynamic, because when you think someone named Genghis wearing a turban being played badly by Count Olaf, you’re potentially in a world of offense. And the last thing any of us would want would be to offend anyone that would be sensitive to anything like that. So we went against type.”

Next, Harris tackled Gunther, the auctioneer in the Ersatz Elevator episodes. “He looks very much like Karl Lagerfeld-ish. He has the big glasses to hide his brow, he has a ponytail, big, fake white teeth, the high collar. Everything he says is sort of German…waving a fan, but sort of French at the same time because his accent’s bad.”

“There’s a guy named Dr. Mattathias Medicalschool. He was based on the book Hostile Hospital where you mostly only heard Count Olaf over a loudspeaker. So I wanted to come up with a voice that was a loudspeaker voice, so I thought 1930’s/40’s, the Hindenburg disaster kind of: ‘Attention! It’s very important that you listen to the following thing that I say.'”

After all that, though, Harris did cop to a slight “favorite.” He’s apparently particularly fond of Detective DuPin. “In the book, Daniel wrote that he’s just thinks everything is the coolest. He has big flashy shoes and a leather jacket,” Harris said. “So I just sort of played him like he scatted a lot. He was sort of a hep cat, he had a straw hat, and he had a gold tooth and he sort of talked like he was a little Jason Mraz, you know? He had a toothpick and he was bad, man. He just kind of walked around funky-like.”

“So that was fun to do for a month,” Harris said with a smile.

Season 2 of A Series of Unfortunate Events is now streaming on Netflix.