Back when John Cho made Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, he never expected the movie would be released, let alone that he and co-star Kal Penn would three-peat, complete with “comedy ninja” Neil Patrick Harris.

Yet here he is, ready to release A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, out Friday. Turning the goofy 2004 stoner film into a trilogy is “bizarre” Cho tells Wired.com in the video above.

“Not only did I not think the third one would be made, I didn’t think the first one would be made whilst making it,” Cho says. “But indeed it was a real movie, and it really got released, and then it became actually popular with people on DVD and here we are on our third one.”

In the follow-up to 2008’s Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Cho’s character Harold has cleaned up his act, gotten married and become a player in the Wall Street world. While the new film’s financial-sector subplot makes way for an oddly prescient Wall Street protest, it’s the marriage part that brought co-star Danny Trejo into the Harold and Kumar fold. (Trejo plays Harold’s Christmas-tree-obsessed father-in-law.)

The R-rated comedy also brings back co-star Harris, who plays a smarmy jerk version of himself preparing a Christmas performance in the latest Harold and Kumar joint.

“You’ll notice in this film, I love this, he does a Neil Patrick Harris movie-star voice and then he has a backstage voice,” Cho says of the How I Met Your Mother star. “I just think that’s so inventive. He’s just a ninja of comedy.”

A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas, directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson, will be showing in midnight screenings Thursday and opens nationwide Friday.