Eleven years ago, Neil Patrick Harris served a dish at his party for which today he has had to do a lot of explaining and apologizing. In 2011, three months after Amy Winehouse’s death, the actor held a Halloween buffet where he and his husband David Burtka served a meat cake, in the shape of a decomposing corpse, which they called “The Corpse of Amy Winehouse.”
The gruesome, twisted cake, which was offered to party guests, featured the singer’s iconic hairstyle and tattoos, as well as cigarettes and other elements. In case it wasn’t clear that it was Amy Winehouse the one the meat cake represented, its authors added a small card indicating that it was her corpse, made of beef ribs, pulled pork, and chicken sausages in spicy BBQ sauce. Needless to say, it was extremely graphic and disgusting.
And even though the prank happened more than a decade ago, the Internet doesn’t forget when something is insensitive and in bad taste. The image of the cake at Neil Patrick Harris’ buffet rose from the ashes when different users tweeted about it again, but the original image was taken by Justin Mikita, husband of Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who was one of the guests at the party.
The ‘How I Met Your Mother’ actor finally apologized in a statement to Entertainment Weekly: “A photo recently resurfaced from a Halloween party my husband and I hosted 11 years ago. It was regrettable at the time and remains regrettable now. Amy Winehouse was a once-in-a-generation talent, and I apologize for any pain this image may have caused.”
Story originally published in Cultura Colectiva
