Cobie Smulders didn’t go to Sunday’s Golden Globes or any of its glitzy after-parties.
Instead, the 36-year-old “How I Met Your Mother” alum — now starring in the cringe comedy “Friends from College” — opted for a much more exclusive get-together: a weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her high school buddies.
“I’m still very close with all of them,” the Canadian native tells The Post. Now living in Los Angeles, the mother of two spent the informal reunion “drinking lots of alcohol with them, because that’s what you do in Canada and with high school friends.”
Smulders, who’s made her name on television shows about exceptionally tight-knit friends, gets the appeal of keeping in touch. Even more, her real affection for old classmates helps her understand why the hilariously high-maintenance characters in “Friends from College,” which returns to Netflix on Friday for its second season, are still speaking to one another.
“There are just some friendships you’ve had for so long, there’s this really significant bond,” Smulders says of the often-toxic crew.
These characters attended Harvard together and now, at 40, are still grappling with the same issues they had in adolescence. Among them: the lofty literary ambitions of Ethan (Keegan-Michael Key), who fancies himself the next Hemingway but begrudgingly pens mainstream young adult novels. Ethan, who’s married to Smulders’ character, Lisa, acts out by cheating on her with Sam (Annie Parisse), the venomous queen bee of the group.
Meanwhile, Lisa, an affable lawyer, spends most of the first season turning the other cheek. And when she finally does acknowledge the affair, she unravels spectacularly, quitting her hedge fund job in a way that makes Jerry Maguire’s iconic office exit look chill.
“I do enjoy these types of characters that are perceived as one thing and then you get to see the human side of them,” Smulders says of Lisa, as well as her “How I Met Your Mother” character, wild card Robin Scherbatsky. Like Lisa, Robin comes off as uncannily cool — which makes her rare but epic meltdowns more fun to watch.
But unlike her characters, Smulders says, she’s genuinely mellow. “I don’t rage,” she says. “It takes a lot for me to get really angry. It’s maybe happened like three times in my life, where I’m like, screaming at someone.”
So is she getting it all out on-screen? Smulders says it’s possible: “Maybe I gravitate towards these roles because it’s a relief,” she says.
She says she has her Canadian background to thank for her “even-keeled” personality. The two stints she did living in New York — one in 2001, right after high school, when she moved to the city to pursue acting and modeling, and another more recently, as a married mom — didn’t make her any more high-strung. (What the city does, she confesses, is coax out her inner party girl: “My main relationship with New York is living the nightlife and being out at hours that children are asleep.”)
Now back in Los Angeles, Smulders sounds grateful that her own family life is delightfully stable. She married former “SNL” cast member Taran Killam in 2012, but they’ve been together for 14 years, ever since they met at a friend’s roller rink birthday party. They have two daughters: Shaelyn, 9 and Joelle, 4.
She says Killam, unlike her TV husband, “has a lot of empathy, which was a very big initial draw.”
As for the fallout from Ethan’s deception and Lisa’s spiral? “Just wait,” Smulders says, enigmatically. “It’s really a wonderful plot for comedy, but I would never want to be in it in real life.”
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