In How I Met Your Mother, Barney Stinson had three true loves: suits, women, and Star Wars. The show played his obsession for laughs – especially when he judged potential partners based on whether they loved The Empire Strikes Back (a worthy baseline, to be fair) – but the writers weren’t just creating a quirky character trait.
For starters, Neil Patrick Harris himself is a massive fan of the galaxy far, far away, and the showrunners made that detail canon. Harris, famously a fan of all things Disney, even created epic Star Wars Halloween costumes for his family the year after HIMYM went off the air.
As for his on-screen character, under the surface of his cartoonish womanizing and Rulebook logic, Barney was a guy looking for connection. What better mirror than Star Wars, with its ongoing themes of family, destiny, and redemption?
Barney’s Empire obsession plays a pivotal role in the show’s dynamic. In Season 2’s “Swarl Wars,” he reveals that he watches the movie at least once a year and believes it’s the ultimate litmus test for romantic compatibility. The episode even dives into a joke where Barney claims any woman who doesn’t like Empire by the third date is automatically a dealbreaker.
At first glance, that seems ridiculous. But, on the flipside, how many fans have quietly judged someone for not knowing who Lando Calrissian is? Or claimed The Last Jedi is a nonstarter for dating? In that sense, Barney’s exaggerated stance is just a funhouse mirror version of fandom gatekeeping. You know, the kind that most of us in the Star Wars fandom have internalized (at least a little).
Of course, it wasn’t all jokes. The show often used Star Wars to hint at deeper truths about Barney’s character. His love of Empire, the darkest and most emotionally complex installment of the original trilogy, reflected the cracks in his own carefully constructed persona. Beneath the catchphrases and suits was a man who had been abandoned by his father and struggled with intimacy, just like Luke Skywalker himself.
This plays out, quite literally, in Season 1’s “Game Night,” as Barney’s transformation is revealed through a Darth Vader lens.
As creator Craig Thomas recently recounted on the How We Made Your Mother podcast, “The premise here is, there is someone who is inside of a Darth Vader costume, and there’s more to him than meets the eye. And that’s so much more interesting than a guy who just hooks up with a lot of women and seems really cool. Like, I wanna see who is that guy really, and that’s the best part of this episode.”
It’s also worth noting that How I Met Your Mother didn’t just reference Star Wars in passing. George Lucas’s saga is embedded in the very DNA of the series. From Ted's Princess Leia fantasy to Marshall’s Ewok line in the finale, the franchise became a stand-in for shared cultural memory that bonds friends through everything life throws their way.
Barney’s love of Star Wars isn’t a character gag. It makes him more complex. In fact, it’s brilliant character architecture. It reveals loyalty, heartbreak, and longing for something deeper than the fleeting pleasure he seems to chase every day.
The enduring appeal of Harris’s character lies in that tension; Vader’s mask conceals Anakin’s broken hero, and Stinson’s suits conceal Barney’s fragile soul. How I Met Your Mother used Star Wars not to frame jokes but to hint at how all people construct personas, carry legacies, and seek redemption.
While Barney’s Star Wars obsession might have started as fodder for punch lines, look closer, and it’s one of the show’s clearest emotional barometers.