Robin Charles Scherbatsky Jr. is a fictional character created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas for the CBS television series How I Met Your Mother, portrayed by Cobie Smulders. Robin is the on and off love interest of Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) and Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), and a close friend to Lily Aldrin (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall Eriksen (Jason Segel). Development The creators of How I Met Your Mother, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, always intended for Robin Scherbatsky not to be "The Mother" of Ted Mosby's children. Rather, Ted perceives Robin as the perfect woman, but "it’s [still] not his final love story." Bays and Thomas have said that "a pretty famous actress" turned down the role of Robin; they revealed in February 2014 that it was Jennifer Love Hewitt. They then cast Cobie Smulders, an unknown actress at the time. Bays and Thomas later said: "Thank God we did for a million reasons... when Ted’s seeing her for the first time, America’s seeing her for the first time – the intriguingness of that propelled the show going forward and kept the show alive." Early life Robin Charles Scherbatsky Jr. was born on 23 July 1980 to a Canadian father, Robin Charles Scherbatsky Sr. (Ray Wise), and an English mother, Genevieve Scherbatsky (Tracey Ullman), in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a teenage sister named Katie (Lucy Hale). She has a difficult relationship with her father, who raised her as if she were a boy. She is a fan of the Vancouver Canucks, a professional National Hockey League (NHL) ice hockey club based in Vancouver. Robin had a minor career as a bubblegum pop singer under the stage name of Robin Sparkles, with one hit single, "Let's Go to the Mall." After an accompanying music video, and the ensuing year-long mall tour, she developed a serious aversion to shopping malls that lasted for years. Robin followed "Let's Go to the Mall" with the "artistic follow-up" "Sandcastles in the Sand", which tanked. As Robin Sparkles, she also appeared on the Canadian educational children's show Space Teens with Alan Thicke and Jessica Glitter (Nicole Scherzinger), about two teen girls traveling through space in a curling stone–shaped spaceship who "solve mysteries using math." The show was heavy with unintentional sexual innuendo, such as the song "Two Beavers Are Better Than One". Robin attempted to shift from teen pop to grunge by